Running this site locally

Notes for future me: how to get from a bare clone to a live local preview of this site, and how to add a new post.

The stack

The site is Jekyll on top of the al-folio v1.x theme. Layouts and plugins mostly come from gems, so the repository itself stays small: it holds content (_pages, _news, _posts), configuration (_config.yml), and a handful of local overrides such as the blog archive.

The build targets Ruby 3.3 with Bundler. macOS ships an older system Ruby, so install a supported one first:

brew install ruby@3.3
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby@3.3/bin:$PATH"

Install dependencies

Gems are vendored into the project so the rest of the system stays untouched:

bundle config set --local path 'vendor/bundle'
bundle install

Gem downloads were the slow part on my connection, so the project config also points Bundler at a nearby mirror:

bundle config set --local mirror.https://rubygems.org \
  https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/rubygems

Serve

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload --drafts --future

That serves the site at http://127.0.0.1:4000 and rebuilds on save, so the browser reflects edits within a second or two.

• --livereload reloads the page after each rebuild.
• --drafts renders files in _drafts/, which have no date in their filename.
• --future publishes posts dated later than today.

Writing a post

Posts live in _posts/ and are named YYYY-MM-DD-title.md. The front matter the archive reads is:

---
layout: post
title: "Post title"
date: 2026-10-02
description: One sentence shown in the archive listing.
categories: [ml-systems]
tags: [inference, kernels]
---

The archive on the blog page groups posts by year and builds its topic filters from categories and tags, so those fields are worth filling in.