I haven’t written a lot of posts on my main blog, apart from travel impressions. Part of the reason was that I had two new topics in mind, which I wanted to give more weight than just a tag. So I decided to create a subdomain and have an entirely new blog there. And always wanting to expand my technical experience, I decided to create a quarto-based blog.

What is quarto, you might ask? They call themselves “an open-source scientific and technical publishing system”, and allow you not only to create blogs and websites, but also literate programming whether you program with python, Julia or R. That’s how I first came across quarto: as an alternative to jupyter notebooks when doing some data scienc-y stuff with python. Similarly, I have used it quite extensively with R, which is currently my programming home base, to create programmatic analysis that is intertwined with textual comments and take-aways, both in a single file as well as a whole “quarto book” (which is basically a bit like a website, but you could also render it into a pdf or to yet another format). Sounds all a bit puzzling? For many cases, their documentation is excellent, and if it’s not, it helps to find other people’s examples.

To get started, I created a github repository, and basically followed this guide for creating a blog by running something like quarto create project blog some_name in the console. The _quarto.yml file is where the metadata for the blog is put together (styling, layout etc.), and adding a new post is as simple as adding a new subfolder with an index.qmd File to the posts subfolder. Running quarto render then renders everything into html which can be viewed in the browser.

To make the blog available for other people, I need to put it on a server though – I want to put in a subfolder of where this blog is sitting, so I can use it as a subdomain. The way I did this is by setting up a github action which copies the rendered html to this server via FTP, with the credentials stored as pipeline secrets. Therefore every time I push to the github repository, the deployment happens automatically.

There we go: here‘s the new blog where I’ll post about music! If anyone knows how to port a wordpress blog like this one to something like quarto, let me know, that might be the next technical change going on here!