Blogging with Quarto

blog

Creating my Webpage with Quarto

Author

Justin Donaldson

Published

April 15, 2024

I’m creating a new blog, and was surveying the various options. I’ve been using the default Jekyll “Pages” functionality offered from Github for years, but it’s time to move to something more modern.

I came across Quarto from a recent post by Jeremy Howard, and was immediately sold. Quarto has its lineage somewhat in the realm of Tex, which is an ancient text setting program written by Donald Knuth, one of the early fathers of computer programming. The Tex computer program eventually evolved into LaTex, which has a scholarly citation management system called BibTeX. Quarto has a mechanism to use these scholarly bibliographic formats, like the ones I maintain for myself when I was writing my dissertation.

However, instead of using the somewhat obtuse LaTex syntax, Quarto uses variations on Markdown, which is a much simpler plain text format for creating basic formatted text. The “qmd” format is easy enough to type out manually with no editor other than a basic terminal (which is also what I use to write these posts). You can see the basic qmd format for this post here.

I find that I don’t need to write as many mathematical formulas here. Although Quarto enables that easily as well. Here’s one of my favorites, the formula for entropy in information theory.

\[H(X) = -\sum_{i=1}^n p(x_i) \log p(x_i)\]

I can also draw some simple diagrams using a builtin Mermaid syntax:

flowchart LR
  A[Hard edge] --> B(Round edge)
  B --> C{Decision}
  C --> D[Result one]
  C --> E[Result two]

I can also easily embed youtube clips:

All in all, most of the basic WYSIWYG formatting work is handled through simple text specification. There’s ways to tweak things even more using css, but for now I’m happy with some basic defaults and theming.

There’s two main reasons why I think it’s worth using Quarto:

It’s Free

It doesn’t cost a dime to use Quarto. I simply took the time to set it up with my free Github account, and use it to publish my site free on Github as well.

Now, there are some that will argue that Quarto is not at all free, in fact it costs time to set this up and write things yourself.

However, I would also argue:

It Has a High “Give a S@&$! Factor”

We’re entering an age where most text written online will be generated or influenced by a generative AI. This post has been written with the help of one. However, I believe that human communication requires some actual proof of work… some way of showing that the author cares about the topic. It’s going to get very difficult to do that unless you structure your communication in a way that shows a deep level of interest in a topic, and not just churning out one-off dross for the sake of posting to Linkedin.

The main reason isn’t that it’s cheap or shows you care though, it’s because you should own your story as long as you can, and you will probably outlive any company that tries to do too many things for you. This brings up the next advantage of Quarto:

It’s Open Source and Lindy

Technology has been around long enough that it should be clear that languages, frameworks, and applications come and go along with the companies that invent them. The concept of the Lindy effect argues that future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing (like an idea or technology) is proportional to its age. Right now, Quarto is built on top of some of the oldest ideas in all of computer theory, and it’s editable and usable inside my Neovim editor, which itself is based off of the VI editor from 1976, using the QWERTY keyboard layout from 1878.

None of these technologies are going to go anywhere. They’re good bets for writing things down that you want to control and preserve.

Thanks for Reading!

I hope I gave a good overview of what Quarto is about, and why it matters. Thanks for taking the time to read. Hoping to see your Quarto site out there some day!