# Math Blogging - what is a decent set up?

I hope this question is not deemed off-topic, but I cannot think of a more appropriate place to ask it (few tech sites care about support for MathJax and $\LaTeX$), and I think that blogging about mathematical topics is certainly part of mathematical education viewed in the broad sense.

Anyway, I currently have an almost-dormant blog on wordpress.com, and I would like to reinvigorate it and post more frequently. However I have realised that Wordpress itself is hampering me, largely because of its primitive support for $\LaTeX$; every expression has to be between non-standard delimiters and is then replaced by an image which is usually the wrong size and aligned incorrectly. So this results in tediously writing not-very-reusable source-text that is rendered into ugly output - basically a lose-lose-lose situation.

So really I need to use something that produces MathJax, and in addition it would be better if I could write once and render to either HTML or $\LaTeX$, which seems to limit the field to various Markdown editors. The StackEdit online editor is extremely good, produces output containing MathJax tags, and has a mechanism for direct "Publish to Wordpress". Almost perfect, except that it doesn't work properly for $\TeX$ - it just passes through the marked-up MathJax constructs which don't work on Wordpress. (It would work on a self-hosted Wordpress, where you can add your own Javascript, but my life is too short to get back into self-hosting.)

Anyway, I had better finish with an actual question:

What is the best way to write mathematical content, preferably using Markdown for formatting, and have the resulting content appear online, with the mathematics rendered in MathJax?

• Do the remarks at Terry Tao's blog help at all? Specifically, those in the penultimate paragraph of the aforelinked (and, perhaps, some of the comments...). – Benjamin Dickman Jun 24 '15 at 4:13
• @BenjaminDickman I had forgotten about that source, but in fact I tried the latex2wp program when I first started, and it does ease the pain somewhat by translating the LaTeX for Wordpress. But the poor rendering and mis-sizing is still there. Terry's blog is so content-dense that people are more willing to work hard at reading it! – Gordon Royle Jun 24 '15 at 9:44
• It's trivial to include mathjax in any web page. At the top of your page, you put in a script tag that loads some javascript from mathjax.org. Then in the body of the page you write your math, surrounded by double dollar signs. – Ben Crowell Jun 24 '15 at 13:23
• @Ben Unfortunately Wordpress (the hosted one) disables any JavaScript, so that is only possible in the self-hosted version, which I don't want to use, due to the difficulty of configuring and managing it. – Gordon Royle Jun 24 '15 at 13:51
• With Wordpress.com, you are flat out of luck. With self-hosted blog platform, anything is possible. With third-party hosted blogs, this is a good resource, but can use some updating. In particular with regards to blogger/blogspot: the general idea is simple: just put the incantation to MathJax somewhere on your page. While Google changes the way to configure pages every now and then, people always seem to find the correct spot. – Willie Wong Jun 25 '15 at 10:19

You could try the Jetpack Plugin

From this post

By 'supporting LaTeX', many people mean 'supporting the use of TeX-like input for mathematical symbols'. That's not the same thing: support LaTeX proper requires a TeX system, supporting just a small subset does not.

Taking WordPress as an example, both TeX-like input and proper LaTeX support are available. By far the most straight-forward way here is to use a plugin to load the appropriate code from elsewhere. MathJax is the technology that is used for example on other StackExchange sites for TeX-like input, and it's available for WordPress using the JetPack plugin. This plugin makes use of the WordPress.com MathJax support.

Also as a commenter pointed out you could use MathJax and while Wordpress disables JavaScript you could use the Simple MathJax plugin to load it. The above post shows an example, the second answer I believe, of how to incorporate the Mathjax cdn and script into your file.

• Unfortunately, Jetpack is a plugin for wordpress.org users (i.e. the self-hosted ones) to get acess to the wordpress.com (i.e the hosted ones) features, not the other way round. I am only too well aware that it is horribly confusing! – Gordon Royle Jul 5 '15 at 6:17
• Ah, I didn't realize that, I am sorry! Thank you for clearing that up. – Jen Jul 5 '15 at 10:23

MathJax seems to work well in Blogger, although this simple example doesn't irrefutably prove that: http://fivetriangles.blogspot.com/2014/07/171-fraction-redistribution.html

• It seems you created a second unregistered account. If you want the accounts to be merged, you can follow the instructions at matheducators.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts (If you want to keep separate accounts for whatever reason this is fine too.) – quid Jul 7 '15 at 11:15