Sef Kloninger's Personal Blog (sefk.github.io)

This is the content hosted at sef.kloninger.com. It's a Nikola static site hosted by Github pages. This repo contains both the source files for the blog and the rendered pages. The source files are in the dev branch (default for this repo) and the build products are pushed to master.

Instructions

The general workflow is:

1. Write. I like writing in Markdown with vi. Green characters on a black background. Old school is the good school. Generally nikola new_post is the way to get started.

2. Review. Nikola has a nice feature to automatically rebuild your project whenever something changes. workflow. Command is nikola auto -p 8888. The extra port because the default, 8000, usually collides with my dev environment or something similar.

3. Publish. Check the changes to the dev branch and push that branch. Then run the command nikola github_deploy to build and publish the build product to the master branch. github_deploy builds, commits, and pushes in one fell swoop.

4. Repeat

Install Notes

Python

Now that Nikola has moved over to Python 3 we have a little bit more to set things up:

cd ./sefk.github.io
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

You'll want to `source ./bin/activate` when starting up future shells. Most likely direnv is installed and should take care of this for you as you move around directories (see [a9d1bd][]).

Nikola

I chose not to check in my theme. I figure maybe it'd be better to have that versioned elsewhere. This will install the requirements to run Nikola and then start it going.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
nikola theme -i bootstrap3
nikola auto

Troubleshooting

nikola auto event processing error (#3881)

> nikola auto
[2025-12-16 14:24:38] ERROR: Nikola: RuntimeError: There is no current event loop in thread 'MainThread'.
[2025-12-16 14:24:38] WARNING: Nikola: To see more details, run Nikola in debug mode (set environment variable NIKOLA_DEBUG=1) or use NIKOLA_SHOW_TRACEBACKS=1

The auto.sh one-liner checked into the root of this repo is a workaround. It does a simple build and serve whenever something changes. It's not as good as a proper nikola auto because that nicely injects some javascript that reloads the page.

Needs brew install entr on MacOS, similar things exist for other OS'es.

lxml error

If you're seeing this:

fatal error: 'libxml/xmlversion.h' file not found error: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1

Then try this:

brew install libxml2
brew install libxslt
brew link libxml2 --force
brew link libxslt --force
CPATH=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.9.sdk/usr/include/libxml2 CFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments CPPFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments pip install lxml

Not sure the brew steps are req'd or not. That last step is what did it. From this answer on StackOverflow.