New year, new blog

Happy new year! The blog has a new look! Well it’s not that different on the surface. But under the hood, it is quite different indeed!

My previous setup was: GitHub to host the code, on each push the build process would get started on Netlify and then it would be hosted there. The engine was Hugo.

This blog now still uses GitHub to host the code, but now also uses GitHub pages for hosting and the engine is Quarto. The blog also gets built on GitHub Actions inside of a Nix environment: so I just need to push and everything gets built! Here’s the workflow that achieves this.

What’s really amazing with Nix, is that I can preview my blog locally using exactly the same environment as the one that will be used for building it on GitHub actions. So if it works on my machine it’s going to work anywhere.

You’ll notice that the last step uses the rstats-on-nix/quarto-nix-actions/publish@main action that is a fork of the quarto-dev/quarto-actions actions that just makes them work inside of a Nix shell! This fork is hosted on the rstats-on-nix organization: I have a lot to say about this organization, but that’s for a future blog post!

Migrating the pages was a rather long process, as I needed to make sure everything was rendering correctly: because the folder structure of Quarto blogs is different than the structure of Hugo blogs, I had to update many paths. This was quite tedious and I didn’t want to use a script for this as I also wanted to take this opportunity to make some adjustments, such as centering images properly and correcting some typos if I saw some. It was also quite interesting to re-read some of my old blog posts.

One neat thing about Quarto is the possibility to use pre- and post-render scripts that can be written in R. I’m using one to correctly sort the blog posts in the main page, as for some reason they weren’t being sorted properly. Here’s the post-render script in question.

Now I can go back to working on rix.