From Jekyll/Github pages to Quarto: my blogging journey so far
Writing and publishing a blog has been on my mind for the last two years. As I have limited experience in web development, it took me a few tries to get to the current version. This blog post explores the journey. If you are more interested in a quick how-to tutorial to get a Quarto-generated blog in 2 days, head over to the article I wrote on the topic.
July 2023 - GitHub Pages and Jekyll
Note: this setup was OK, but I still would not recommend it.
It all started on a warm summer evening in a Berlin Kneipe (old traditional German bar). I was playing chess with two friends. A few beers into the night, we decided to start playing blindfolded. As none of us are very good chess players, you can imagine that the level was very high.
Following this evening, we agreed to do a 30-day challenge of playing one blindfold game a day and see what happens. I decided to document this process with a blog. I used Jekyll, a markdown static site builder, hosted on GitHub Pages.
I managed to hold the challenge for 16 days. I was unable to motivate myself for a game of blindfold chess after a full day of work. I wrote my first four blog posts in the process. Back then, I could not find any more reasons to write, or topics to write about, and decided to take the blog down.
August 2023 - WordPress
Note: this is NOT something I would recommend.
After listening to a Matt Mullenweg interview, I decided to give WordPress a go. I bought the eliottkalfon.com domain on Namecheap (12 USD/year), along with a WordPress hosting subscription (30ish USD/year).
I then started crawling through WordPress plugins and themes. This was terrible. I found the WordPress UI difficult to understand, installed countless plugins, lost my work at least five times… This was not an enjoyable experience at all.
Coming from a computer science/engineering background, I am always anxious as I click through user interfaces. The fear of losing my work quickly creeps in after 5–10 clicks. I would much rather work with version-controlled files, with configuration represented as code instead of a sequence of clicks, drop-downs and drag & drops.
October 2023 - Quarto and Netlify
In one of my monthly calls with a good friend of mine, he told me about the new website for his “fractional CFO side-gig” (his words not mine) he had created using HTML/CSS templates, hosted on Netlify (for free). I was impressed by the result a he does not come from a technical background.
This made me want to try a code-based website using Netlify. I tried to use HTML/CSS with GPT help, but this did not work out for me. I wanted a way to write blog posts using markdown as easily as possible. When I saw GPT starting to code a markdown to HTML converter, I stopped the project there. I thought to myself: “There must be a better way.” And a better way there was.
I remembered reading a few professional-looking data science blog articles using Quarto as a site generator. I looked into it and fell in love with the interface. In less than two hours I had a first version of the blog working, with impressive rendering of both code and mathematical equations.
Deploying this with Netlify was seamless. I logged in with GitHub, created a free account and the site was live! It only took me a few tries to get the site published on my domain due to some DNS configuration I had to change on Namecheap. The process is well explained in the Netlify UI; the customer service is also responsive.
Final Thoughts
If there is only one thing that I want to convey in this article is that it is more about the journey than the destination. The most important is to get started. If you have always wanted to publish a blog, now is probably the time. Head to this tutorial to have one up and running on your custom domain in 2 days!