My blogging experience and Fastpages.
My personal experience, when I wanted to implement Fastpages in Gihub, was really disappointing and frustrating. Therefore, an efficient, easy and fast way is to use Netlify with our FanPages site.
My blogging experience and Fastpages.
I have to say, it is not easy for me to be constant in writing texts to be published in the Fastpages blog that I have implemented to narrate and publish my learning experience with Fastai. What is Fastpages? Fastpages is a platform that allows you to create and host a blog for free, without ads and with many useful features. These include writing in markdown, embedding Twitter cards, videos from YouTube, categorising posts with tags, Github support for comments, etc… But perhaps the feature that makes Fastpages special, and the one I like the most, is the ability to create posts directly from Jupyter notebooks. This feature allows us among other things, interactive visualizations made with Altair interactive, hide or show the input and output of the cell, in the same way these, will be collapsible open or closed by default, define the title, resume and other metadata through special discount cells, summary and other metadata through special discount cells, ability to add links to Colab, Deepnote and GitHub automatically.
In the lesson 3 video, Jeremy recommends writing posts about the Fastai learning process. Firstly because it is a good way to better understand the knowledge acquired. By verbalising the thinking in writing, we get a better conceptual understanding of the episteme of the field of Artificial Intelligence. On the other hand, Jeremy says, some Fastai students got good jobs thanks to blog posts. Many companies nowadays evaluate the ability and level of competence in Deep Learning, e.g. through the writing and content of these posts.
My personal experience, when I wanted to implement Fastpages in Gihub, was really disappointing and frustrating. It really took me several days to get the blog up and running. And to do that, I decided to discourage the publication of my posts on Github Pages, because it turned out to be an arkano. I must say, I had doubts if the problem could be due to the use of a specific operating system, in my case Mac, but I also tried with Windows 10 and the result was always the same. The site query, http://twistin.github.io/fastai-project/, always seemed to return the same result, a nice and disheartening ‘404’ page.
At this point, I decided to change my strategy and not waste any more time in the business of publishing my website on Github Pages. In between, a handful of questions and queries on the Fastai and Github forums in the hope of finding the solution to a situation that was starting to become very annoying.
The solution was simpler than you might expect and that was to use Netlify. Netlify is a platform born to automate static web projects. It combines the tasks of continuous integration and deployment of web infrastructure in a single execution flow. It’s free and very easy to implement and works great with our Fastpages site hosted on Github. What I like most is being able to write posts with VSC, update the site via Github Desktop, do a commit master and almost instantly see the result of the site update in Netifly. So I highly recommend it, especially when you run into problems when publishing a website on Github Pages, it will save you time. Implement the site in an easy and fast way and concentrate on what is important in writing our publications.