Personal website migration to Quarto
Preface (a bit of history)
In an age of social media and faster than ever changes, I found that having a personal website is not anymore an essential to promote your science and build a good reputation around your scientific professional career. Personal websites might have been replaced by LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Moreover, from the late 1990s to mid-2010s a good looking and maintained personal website was one of the most effective ways to find collaborators, early learn about advances (publications) and look who-is-who with the aim to find job/project opportunities. So, as a oldie Gen-X scientist, I have maintained some sort of personal website under three reencarnations (2006-2010: www.mat.ucm.es/~pjgonzal; 2010-2016: https://geomechanics.wordpress.com/; and later https://pablojgonzalez.github.io/).
As I moved into my Lecturer position at the University of Liverpool in summer 2016. I was excited to create a new look to my personal website, controlling the content and be more “modern”. By early 2017, I started the migration of my wordpress (dynamic webpage content generator) site (https://geomechanics.wordpress.com/) that served me well during my postdoc career phase. So, my thinking was to migrate to a “simpler” static website generation site hosted in github. There were several options, although in fact mainly two strong and very popular contenders: Jekyll, based to python; and Hugo, based on Go language. Hugo offered some interesting features (fast rendering), however for me the decider was the simple approach to create a productive environment and the nice look of the academic theme. An environment was a single executable, and there were lots of template themes (one in particular was very popular in the twittersphere of those good old times - Academic).
Fastforward a couple of years (2020), I returned to Spain and my home Island, Tenerife to work for CSIC. I push to a larger update, but my configuration was not rendering anymore the website locally on my computer and I was not able to push changes in the git repository. My environment required regular updates in Hugo and also theme. That I started to skip, so the problem compounded over time. Many of the good features essential to the Hugo decision evaporated. Remember, I chose Hugo because it was simple: write your markdowns with minimal headers and execute Hugo.exe in the same folder. I was and am not a professional web designer and I does not compensate investing 10-15 hours every 6 months on keeping alive the website. The scientific world was changing1. So, I resorted to modify directly the html pages hosted in the website github repository. Therefore, the update of the website become unconfortable and over time I stopped updating.
1 Social media has been growing and replacing this form of publicity (personal websites)
Well, we are here few years later (in 2024). Mainly motivated by my PhD student, Moh, who was asked me why the website only showed my former PhD student Yu Jiang. I decided to look around for something new to revive the personal website. I was tired of Hugo, and academic-Wowchemy-HugoPro or whatever they name it. So, I found recently some blog posts on a similar sentiment, in particular on people that used Rmarkdown and Hugo for their websites. Mostly, R language statisticians and several people comented on the migration from Hugo to Quarto.
So, I decided to give it a go and here we have the new website using Quarto scientific document generation software.
What’s Quarto?
Taken from wikipedia
In 2022, Posit announced an R Markdown-like publishing system called Quarto. In addition to combining results of R, code and results using Python, Julia, Observable JavaScript, and Jupyter notebooks can also be used in Quarto documents. Compared to the file extension .Rmd that R Markdown has, Quarto documents have the file extension .qmd. One difference between R Markdown files and Quarto documents is defining options in code chunks.
Acknowledgements
To build this website, I took tips, structures and snippets from these generous people that share their websites and knowledge:
Rob Hyndman and its github public website repository.
Andreas Handel and its github public website repository.
Chris von Csefalvay and its github public website repository.
Citation
@misc{gonzalez2024,
author = {Pablo J. Gonzalez},
title = {Personal Website Migration to {Quarto}},
date = {2024-09-21},
langid = {en-GB}
}