Did it work? Does the URL say Notion? :D
There are so so many benefits to keeping a blog: organizing thoughts and ideas, practicing writing, sharing information and resources, connecting with the research community, and creating a more vibrant and whole public persona.
However, I know that I will never keep a blog updated beyond the initial start-up excitement unless it is thoroughly embedded in my workflow and very easy to use.
I already use Notion extensively just to keep track of my research and ideas. I have a pretty free-flowing approach, where I just create date-ordered pages filled with links, quotes, and images to collect my thoughts. I thought an easy way to get started **would be to just post these working documents publicly and link to them on my academic website here. I can edit them as I make progress and they are automatically updated here live.
As I start to learn more about website coding (HTML, CSS, markdown…?), I can transition to writing these natively. But I would like to start now and post frequently.
This wonderful blogpost by Elain Yao explains how to create this academic website using GitHub pages, and requires very little upfront knowledge. The template she recommends is perfect for PhD students, with pages for blogs, projects, CV, talks, etc.
In the github repository, in the _posts folder, you can modify the frontmatter of a post to use the jekyll-redirect-from plugin which is already included. The below code redirects from the original link "/posts/2012/08/blog-post-1/" to “https://www.google.com”. You can replace this latter link with the URL of a Notion page that you have made public.
---
title: 'Blog Post number 1'
date: 2012-08-14
permalink: /posts/2012/08/blog-post-1/
tags:
- cool posts
- category1
- category2
redirect_from: "/posts/2012/08/blog-post-1/"
redirect_to: "<https://www.google.com>"
---
This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can't remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don't have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.
Headings are cool
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You can have many headings
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Aren't headings cool?
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