Hello, Quarto!

news
stream of consciousness
Published

January 22, 2026

An office desktop next to a window. Atop the desk is a MacBook, a mug of black coffee, a mobile phone, and a notepad and pen.

---
title: "Welcome To My Blog"
author: "Tristan O'Malley"
date: "2026-01-22"
categories: [news]
---

This is the first post in a Quarto blog. Welcome!

![](thumbnail.jpg)

Since this post doesn't specify an explicit `image`, the first image in the post will be used in the listing page of posts.

This is the first post that greets you when you run:

quarto create project blog /path/to/directory "My Blog's Title"

Unassuming, and … kinda LinkedIn-ish.

This site used to be built with Franklin.jl, and I loved it! It was very me; I understood everything it was doing, I could fiddle with and tweak it, and I had control over almost everything. But then I wanted to author a post with some Python in, and I realised just how small the community was, just how overworked the dev team seemed to be.

I needed a change, I needed something that I didn’t have to write my own navigation tree for, didn’t have to write my own plot handling for. I needed something that Just Worked™.

I’ve always had trouble with static site generators because the whole theme of this site, the whole theme of my work, is scientific computing. And so I want code output to be shown, I want interactive plots, I want Jupyter1 in static site form! But the options have always been lacklustre in that regard. I’ve tried Asciidoctor with custom extensions, I’ve tried Jupyter and Pluto, and I finally settled on Franklin. But it’s so rough around the edges, I had to write so much of my own code to get it to do what I want.

Quarto seems nice, though. A big part of me hates how little control I have over it2, but maybe that will change with time. There’s also this weird bug where hot-reloading doesn’t seem to work for files in the posts directory, and only the posts directory…? But it was easy to get setup up with, and I think it does pretty much everything else I want.

So maybe it’ll work? Maybe I’ll finally be content…

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Footnotes

  1. Well I don’t want Jupyter, because Jupyter sucks, but I want notebooks.↩︎

  2. I can’t have the ORCiD logo in the nav bar because it’s not put of the Bootstrap icons 🤬, for example.↩︎