Bhargav Kulkarni

Website Extras

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here are few extra things I have access to in my website if I need them.

Details

asciidoctor has native support for <details> HTML tag. If I write this in asciidoc:

.Click to reveal the answer
[%collapsible]
====
This is the answer.
====

I get this:

Click to reveal the answer

This is the answer.

Admonitions

Admonitions are a neat way to highlight specific information. They are also supported in asciidoctor.

[IMPORTANT]
====
While werewolves are hardy community members, keep in mind the following dietary
concerns:

. They are allergic to cinnamon.
. More than two glasses of orange juice in 24 hours makes them howl in harmony with alarms and sirens.
. Celery makes them sad.

====

Which gets rendered as:

Important!

While werewolves are hardy community members, keep in mind the following dietary concerns:

They are allergic to cinnamon.
More than two glasses of orange juice in 24 hours makes them howl in harmony with alarms and sirens.
Celery makes them sad.

I am still unsure how to style this. I might also have to change the HTML generated.

Quotes

Quotes are pretty useful in a website; my main page uses them!

Here is how you write a quote in asciidoc:

[quote,Monty Python and the Holy Grail]
____
Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being
repressed!

King Arthur: Bloody peasant!

Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's
what I'm on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, Didn't you?
____

Which we see as:

Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

King Arthur: Bloody peasant!

Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, Didn’t you?

— Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Source Code

As a computer scientist, my blog for sure will have some code. Source code listings in asciidoc are simple enough:

[source,python]
----
print('Hello, World!')
----

Becomes:

print('Hello, World!')

I am still on the fence on whether I should have syntax highlighting. I don’t want to fill my blog with code! asciidoctor has some neat features, like adding callouts for specific lines. When I see the need to use those features, I will add styling for them.

Math

asciidoctor did not have any satisfactory way to render math. The only HTML output they had used MathJax (that too an older version). I know MathJax to be slow and the older version is not accessible by screen readers. I could have done something hacky with Katex but now that most popular browsers support MathML, I’d like to use MathML to typeset math in my blog. But, I did not find any MathML renderers for asciidoctor. So I wrote one myself. It just shells out to latexmlmath, which supports packages like amsmath and stmaryrd(indispensable for wacky computer science theory notation). It was very easy to add a new block in asciidoctor. Here is what my MathML block looks like:

[mathml]
++++
\vec{v} \in \mathbb{R}^3 \quad \text{for } x \in \llbracket 0, 1 \rrbracket
++++

which looks like:

\vec{v}\in\mathbb{R}^{3}\quad\text{for }x\in\llbracket 0,1\rrbracket

Pretty neat!

New Look!

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by my friend Andrew's retro website, I’ve decided to turn back the clock on my website. I got rid of the old CSS entirely. ^[1] I also tweaked some of the generated code. For example, the old blog/research index code was a rats nest of <div>'s and CSS flexbox code that Claude spat out a long time ago. Turns out a structured list of things separated by columns and rows can be represented by a <table>! Who would have thought! There is still more surgical cleaning up to do. asciidoctor generates less than desirable HTML for many of its elements. Fortunately we can change what HTML the scripts writes, so it should not be too bad. A weird thing I realized after removing all the CSS is that no CSS webpages seem to be insanely responsive on small screens like mobile phones! Which means the very little styling I intend to do in the future should be fine on all devices. Finally I found these cute little button/banner images to put in the footer:

They look so cool! But I could not find banners for Python (which also powers this site). Now the only thing this site is missing is a <marquee>. If only it was not deprecated…

[1] There is still some CSS remaining

My Website

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have redon my website. Again. The markup is now in asciidoc. I have moved lot of the file wrangling and renaming code to a makefile. The makefile orchestrates asciidoctor and various Python scripts, each of which performs a specific task, such as extracting metadata, generating blog indexes, or filling in templates. The templating engine continues to be mako. I also took the chance to redo the website styling a bit. I took a lot of inspiration from Perfect M- Website.