Use either reStructuredText, Markdown or Jupyter Notebooks. To create an empty post:

$ nikola new_post -f markdown  # default is .rst if not specified

Note that for Jupyter notebook posts the post metadata (title, author, slug, date) goes in the notebook metadata as documented here. Jupyter Lab does not have a metadata editor yet - either use Jupyter notebook, install https://github.com/yuvipanda/jupyterlab-nbmetadata (although that did not work in a first test), or edit the metadata by hand.

To not show the whole post but only the first bit and then read more ..., use <!-- TEASER_END --> (either in plain Markdown or in a Markdown cell in a notebook).

To set up a development environment: in a new conda env or virtualenv:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration file for the site is conf.py.

To build the site, and have it auto-update when you edit content:

nikola auto

Submit pull requests first, those get run on Netlify and you can see a build preview by clicking on the details link at the bottom.