Migrating to Quarto

This website is now managed using Quarto. It ran using blogdown for the last six years, and various other platforms before that. But Quarto had a few advantages, and I wanted to learn how to do it, so here we are.

For the blogdown site, I had to (painfully) hack my own hugo theme to make it look the way I wanted. This one is pretty much straight out of the Quarto box other than some css styling, and some tweaking of Quarto templates. In case anyone wants to create something similar for themselves, I’ve set up a template version with just the bare minimum so you don’t need to wade through the extra folders I’ve kept to ensure existing links continue to work.

Actually, setting up a website in Quarto is extremely easy when following the online instructions. The hard part for me was the migration. There are about 800 pages that make up this site, and about 4000 comments on my blog. I didn’t want to break any existing links, so retaining the same structure was important.

I also decided to convert the commenting system from Disqus to giscus, which is built on Github Discussions. I’ll describe that conversion in a separate post in case anyone else wants to do something similar.

There are almost certainly things that are still broken, so please let me know in the comments below if you find anything that doesn’t work as it should.