Bye, Bye Hugo, Welcome Quarto!
My first blogging impressions with Quarto
My first blog entry with Quarto
This is my first entry in a new blog powered by Quarto. After continuously struggling with the complex machinery blogdown - Hugo - Wowchemy, I feel like coming home from a trip abroad!
Following the Quarto guide Creating a Blog, it took me only 2 (!) minutes to render the provided blog template locally. After just one hour, I had my blog using Quarto, GitHub, and Netlify online. And half of this time, I spent thinking about a name for my blog and what to do with my older and outdated other blogdown web presences. (To put this quick access into perspective: I already had a GitHub account, GitHub credential, and a Netlify account. And I didn’t work on the content of a blog entry but used just the installed test pages.)
I never was happy with the rapid development of Hugo that brought with it many changes and a considerable learning overhead. The same problem happened with the Academic theme by Wowchemy. The end product looked nice and ran fast, but I had already forgotten some of the many details for a good-looking blog post after two weeks. As a result, I spent more time learning the blog machinery than I had time to write about substantive subjects.
It was helpful when Yihui Xie introduced `blogdown::checksite()` and the possibility of freezing to a specific Hugo version. But the work in the blogdown-Hugo environment was never intuitive and satisfying. I think it’s self-explanatory that the introductory message to the blogdown book for over two years now states as a note from the authors: “Some of the information and instructions in this book are now out of date because of changes to Hugo and the blogdown package.”
Future plans
I am sure there will also be some intricacies I must learn and overcome with Quarto, but this will conform with all my other R knowledge. At the moment, my feeling is enthusiastic: It is easy and intuitive to write on this platform. I hope to overcome technical barriers and concentrate on thematic topics finally. Since English is not my mother tongue, it is already difficult enough to express myself precisely about complex content-related questions. I don’t need any additional technical difficulty in writing blog posts.
In contrast to my previous website projects, I am planning two different strategies:
I will not go into the details of the website design immediately but will work on these issues from time to time.
I will not announce the website until I am sure I will use it regularly and long-term. I think that about 10 articles – written in two months – should give me the trust that I will use it sustainably.