Setting up a minimal Quarto blog

Getting started with technical blogging using Quarto is straightforward. This post will guide you through, step by step, the setting up a minimal Quarto blog.

Author

Affiliation

Ronald (Ryy) Glenn Thomas

UCSD

quarto

1 Introduction

Review this post:

Quarto is an extension of the Rmarkdown ecosystem. It leverages the power of knitr and pandoc, providing a number of useful additional tools for literate programming, report generation and blogging.

I’m using quarto for my lab’s home page with an embedded blog. (focusonR.org).

This post will describe some of the core components We’ll start with a minimal setup to provide some orientation.

The recommended method from the Quarto documentation initiate a blog, say qblog, is to run the command quarto create-project in your ~/shr blog development directory.

Note: Quarto types include blogs, websites, manuscripts, books, etc.

❯ quarto create-project qblog --type website:blog

This command generates a project folder ~/shr/qblog with the following structure:

qblog/
|-- _quarto.yml
|-- about.qmd
|-- index.qmd
|-- posts/
|   |-- _metadata.yml
|   |-- post-with-code/
|   |   |-- image.jpg
|   |   `-- index.qmd
|   `-- welcome/
|       |-- index.qmd
|       `-- thumbnail.jpg
|-- profile.jpg
`-- styles.css

Note: A quarto blog can be much more elaborate than this template, but it can also be further minimized

To start blogging the next steps are:

• cd to ~/shr/qblog/posts/
• for the post, create a new directory, say sample_post
• cd to ~/shr/qblog/posts/sample_post
• create and edit a index.qmd file adding content, e.g. using vim. vim index.qmd

Before we go any further let’s examine the basic elements of the site. The framework for a quarto blog can be quite minimal. For example the following subset of files is sufficient for a useful blog:

minimal_qblog
|-- _quarto.yml
|-- index.qmd
`-- posts
    |-- index.qmd
    `-- sample_post.qmd

with file contents:

_quarto.yml

project:
  type: website
website:
  title: "Thomas Lab home page"
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: posts/index.qmd
        text: Blog
format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo

index.qmd

---
title: "Thomas lab"
---

**Director: Professor Ronald G. Thomas**<br>
School of Public Health<br>
UC, San Diego<br>
La Jolla, California

Focused on new and useful data science technologies.

posts/index.qmd

---
title: "Blog"
listing: default
---

posts/post1.qmd

---
title: "First post"
---

# Introduction

    Minimal text for first post. 

2 Results

Minimal blog presents as the following:

When run the first time the quarto engine generates a web site in the directory _site. This site contains CSS code as defined by the theme command in the _quarto.yml file.

3 Appendix

mcanouil/awesome-quarto: A curated list of Quarto talks, tools, examples & articles

Consider some ideas from

• Rob Hyndman - Template of quarto website

• Eric Ekholm - Modifying the Default Quarto Blog Structure

• Allison Hill - We don’t talk about Quarto

• Nick Tierney - Notes on Changing from Rmarkdown/Bookdown to Quarto

• Samantha Csik * Creating your personal website using Quarto

• 2024-06-12 [ Adding a blog to your existing Quarto website ] ( https://samanthacsik.github.io/posts/2022-10-24-quarto-blogs/ )

3.1 Prerequisites

In development

3.2 Step-by-Step Implementation

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3.3 Key Takeaways

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3.4 Further Reading

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