Using LaTeX in a WordPress Blog

I just got this blog started after buying the hosting service from dreamhost.com. Last time I hired hosting service was in the early 2000’s and it was a horrible experience. Dreamhost is great. You can have unlimited domains, subdomains, etc. with even the cheapest plan. Best of all is that great things like WordPress, MediaWiki, PhpBB, etc. are installable from a control panel. Dreamhost was recommended to me by a friend so it was easy to choose, but I am sure glad that I did.

I wasn’t too happy with the themes that WordPress had included by default, mainly because I don’t like blogs that are three miles long and 2 inches wide. In the end I chose Hemingway as my theme because the home page shows snippets of recent posts with a “read more” link below them. Getting the theme installed was as easy as copying the link from the theme repository and pasting it after a wget in a terminal window, then unzipping the file into wp-content/themes/.

I adjusted some options, but the reason I didn’t just do this on blogger is because I wanted to be able to show equations (among other flexibilities), and I found this post which includes instructions on how to use a script the guy wrote to quickly install the latexrender plugin. I used his script and it worked like a charm. latexrender seems to be one of the nicer ones, as the equations don’t come out so horribly pixelated.

I attribute most of the success to dreamhost really. Of course I’d really love to see a whole blog interface where you just use all of LaTeX, so that a blog could quickly be turned into a PDF.