How to make a Wolfram blog?

Questions
1

Hi,
I would like to create a blog mainly for the purpose to demo small data explorations with WL. I would like to use my personal website for the purpose (not cloud notebooks which are of course a simple solutions). Does anybody know what is needed to achieve something to https://blog.wolfram.com with posts generated from WL notebooks.

Currently I use generated pdf’s in wordpress, but it’s not all that useful for readers who would want to try code.

Any new features in WL12 I could use?

2

I have made a package that can export notebooks to WordPress, which is also how the Wolfram Blog works. I have described my package here:

http://wolframlanguagereviews.org/2018/10/28/posting-notebooks-to-wordpress

You can see an example of an article here:

http://wolframlanguagereviews.org/2018/08/09/domain-decomposition-method-using-graph-coloring

You can get the package here:

Unfortunately, it’s not particularly easy to set up or use at the moment. WordPress 5 brought with it a regrettable change, the Gutenberg editor, which is incompatible with this approach because it doesn’t let you store custom HTML. It will always try to change the HTML for you, even if you don’t want it to. I solved this by installing a plugin which disabled the new editor and reverted to the one in WordPress 4, but even here there is the caveat that you must never use the WYSIWYG editor because if you do it will mess with the HTML.

To sum it up, I have written a solution that works well for me but it is not yet easy for others to use so you have to be prepared for some trouble if you decide to use it. So far, I know of one other person who has successfully installed it.

3

Thanks a lot for the prompt answer Calle. I will try to install the “Classic Editor” plugin and use your package.

Your blog looks great, exactly what I was looking for!

4

I think Wolfram Community is a great medium to share your blogs. A lot of advantages:

  • Reach medium for formatting (ultimately headed for Cloud Notebooks embedment)
  • Network w/ one of the highest concentration of people interested in Wolfram Technology
  • So you get a chance to share w/ the right folks and get a great feedback
  • Great SEO - and web search engines discovery
  • Very easy to use posting tools
  • Your content can get highlighted in Staff Picks editorial column: http://wolfr.am/StaffPicks
  • Your profile then will become a badged as featured contributor and list all your Staff Picks - for instance: Marco Thiel

You can also simply use Wolfram Cloud to deploy your blog as a notebook.

If you set your mind on external hosting take a look at:

There were a lot of other various discussions on this subject before but outdated ones might have been removed.

5

I wrote some blogging tools way back in Mathematica V 5 which I used for a while. But I haven’t revisited the process since then. It’s in a set of tools that I wrote for myself (and still use for the general organization of my work in Mathematica). I think a lot can be done to create a new approach if one wanted to–but getting things right is subtle to reproduce all that one can do in a notebook, so taking an approach (if one forgoes the HTMLSave route) where some rules are set that restrict what one can put into a notebook that will be exported is the best starting point, rather than trying to get all the bells and whistles working. Paul-Jean Letourneau’s tools are a good start. Internally it seems that Wolfram Research apparently uses a complex workflow (perhaps a WRI employee can comment) to create their blog postings.

But here is what I did about 10 years ago:

The set of tools (I give it away for free these days if anyone’s interested… no support though anymore):

http://scientificarts.com/worklife/

Documentation on the blogging functionality:

http://scientificarts.com/worklife/documentation/blogging.html

Some (old marketing) examples of blog postings:

http://scientificarts.com/worklife/wlfwblog/index.html

If I were to do this again I’d certainly take the route to implement it (at least as an option) some form of Markdown along with things like TeX/MathJax, etc…

P.S. All this stuff in this set of tools still works 10 years later with only minimal updates to the code. An amazing testament to the backward compatibility of the Wolfram Language, given that the codebase for this is about 50,000 lines… !

6

Hi Vitaly,
all very convincing reasons and I will certainly also use the Wolfram community and cloud in the future for a wide and highly competent audience. Thanks for the good links.

7

Here’s some of my stuff for this:

I have many, many websites I’ve made from notebooks and am always working on extending all this stuff to be even easier/more convenient.

It’s all basically just Notebook → Markdown → XML → XMLTemplate → theme → website

8

A BIG caveat that just has to be mentioned is that all content on this site goes under the ShareAlike license. The moment you post something here, you no longer own it.

9

If you do, feel free to ask me as many questions as you want.