Motivations for writing blog posts
My conception, written in my first blog entry, needed to be revised. The problem was a certain kind of perfectionism: I thought that my knowledge about R issues was not deep enough to be interesting to other people. After visiting the useR!2024 conference, I changed my view in four aspects:
- R has a dynamic community where new people are constantly attracted. My meager knowledge could be helpful, especially for beginners, as I was struggling with the same starter issues not long ago. Sometimes, a person with intermediate knowledge can be more beneficial than an expert.
- The R project is a very complex field. Nobody has the same level of expert knowledge in every area. Therefore, it is possible that some parts of my knowledge could be useful for other people, even if they are (in other areas or generally) much more advanced.
- Putting my understanding into words so that other people can use this information for their project is an important exercise: It ensures that I have grasped the essentials and fosters my learning by writing down all the necessary details.
- The most important reason to write blog posts about issues I have learned is the “Future me.” After several months of working on other topics, I often notice that I have forgotten some details of procedures I have already learned.
To elaborate on the last point: In one case, I was looking for a solution to a problem I experienced. After several web searches, I found the solution on StackOverflow. I was shocked when I noticed that it was me who wrote the correct answer several years ago!
A new start
After the useR!2024, I was very motivated to resume the Quarto blog I started in April 2023. I noticed that there are two versions: One published via Netlify and another one – already pretty elaborated – locally.
Looking for a glitch
The local version had a small but annoying flaw. It displayed three colons ::: at the beginning of the listing on the homepage and at the end of every post. I knew that ::: represents special fenced syntax for native Div blocks in pandoc.
Whatever I tried, I could not find the problem and solve it.
- I looked into all articles to see if there was a redundant fenced syntax symbol.
- I set for all posts
draft: true. - I even cloned the remote repo only to get the same behavior.
Starting from scratch
Another drawback was that I did not understand many code lines, especially in _quarto.yml but also in posts/_metadata.yml and in the main index.qmd.
Finally, I decided to start with a new blog. I created a new repo with a different name, initiated a new RStudio project, and so on. As a surplus, I documented every single step. I wrote extensive notes and shot screenshots of every necessary action. After each tiny change, I checked the results by rendering the blog.
Lesson learned
As a result, I have extensive material to explain how to initialize a Quarto blog, which I will publish in several posts in the next few days. And I finally found the reason for the surplus fenced div!