flowchart LR A[Interactive plot?] --> B(Excited audience...) B --> C[Excitement!] B --> D[Confusion!]
Well, isn’t this all fancy and posh! After much back and forth over a decent blogging platform, I think I’ve finally found a decent, well maintained home … meet Quarto!
So, what did I want from a blogging platform, and why did it take so long to get here?
- Easily maintained, static pages (no paying for fancy maintained services1)
- Native(ish) support for Python Jupyter notebooks and RMarkdown
- Support for both technical writing (functions, code, citations) and interactive elements
- Make it pretty!
So, does it work? Is it pretty? It’s gorgeous.
I’ve tried a variety of options over the past few years (notably Pelican, Nikola and Hugo) but none of them have quite fit the bill
I eventually settled on Nikola because of how consistenly it handled Jupyter, but found RMarkdown support a pain, and it wasn’t quite as well maintained and documented as I would have liked.
You’ve probably also noted some of the niftier other features of Quarto sprinkled through this, especially for technical writing… callouts, citations, bibliographies ahoy!
Check out a Callout!
I’ve been using Obsidian to manage my personal notes for a few months, and being able to make notes gorgeous and functional has been a real pleasure…now I can share that with everyone else!
With native support for interactive Jupyter widgets, I’m looking forward to seeing just how many plots and maps I can show off… It’s a really promising start! I haven’t got anything too much to show for now, so instead check out this nifty, automatically generated plot.
Hopefully this is the first post of many on my new and improved blog, and I hope you enjoy it!
Footnotes
There are plenty of fancy companies that probably advertise on your favourite podcast or Youtube video, but I wanted to keep it simple.↩︎