Things I’d like in a blog

quarto has strengths and drawbacks

Other frameworks (like Hugo) are more flexible. But quarto offers a lot more out of the box and handles the stuff I really don’t want to have to think about.

A traditional Quarto

Things quarto is good at:

• Handles metadata really well (easy to get a title image, description, Twitter card, etc.)
• heavily customizable: can organize posts as a list, as a table, as a grid, etc. can easily customize what’s in that. The main thing I didn’t like about Hugo was that the style was just slightly different than I liked it.
• comments
• searching
• categories/tags
• easy to create different/custom listings
• can blog from my phone using Working Copy and GitHub actions

Things wish quarto were better at:

• Faster render (Hugo speeds plz)
• Don’t render future posts
• A blog landing page that had a stream of entries, rather than just a list. (Similar to seths.blog)
• Listings based on tags
• make it easy to have an alternate slug (make all posts at root, and not in posts/)

Things I’d like to do with my blog:

• generate weekly summaries
• build some subscribers
• send out a weekly summary of content.
• auto-post to Twitter, Instagram (using photo + description + zapier) and Facebook.
• auto-post anything with “LinkedIn” tag to LinkedIn
• move editing into a vault in Obsidian
• make it easier to copy ChatGPT photos to my blog post folder

For now, what it offers widely covers what it doesn’t. Most blog templates don’t allow for search, custom listings, lists of tags, Twitter content, etc. For now, quarto offers 95% of what I need.

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Bryan lives somewhere at the intersection of faith, fatherhood, and futurism and writes about tech, books, Christianity, gratitude, and whatever’s on his mind. If you liked reading, perhaps you’ll also like subscribing: