New Website - Quarto

open source
GIS
communication
online
Author

Nick Bearman

Published

September 20, 2024

I’ve been thinking for a bit of time that I need to redo my website as some of the pages had evolved a bit, and were getting a bit too long. What you see now is what I have come up with:

I also took the opportunity to ‘rebrand’ myself. Previously I’d used the name Geospatial Training Solutions to market my freelance work. I was never completely happy with the name - it was a bit long and a bit generic - and after some thought I decided I would be better trading under my own name - Nick Bearman - as that is a name already known in the GIS community and it is me that I am selling. I am freelance and have no current plans to expand or to hire other people - I am just me!

Anyway, once I’d made that decision, the question was how to make my new website. I’ve been using WordPress which worked reasonably well, but it has a relatively complex infrastructure under the hood (database, etc.) which:

  1. opens it up to more vulnerabilities and

  2. upgrading WordPress was always something that needed to be done every so often, and then I had to make sure everything worked as I wanted.

I looked around and found various examples that were similar to what I wanted to achieve:

I mostly used these to think about content, but it was also helpful to consider the different technologies as well. More people were using WordPress that I thought, and often they were not ‘obviously’ WordPress sites. I wanted something simple, and certainly something I could update easily. Easy of updating was a common theme! To quote Pokateo / Kate:

From https://x.com/pokateo_maps/status/1473766842661539840

At this point, Quarto had been released and they had some interesting possibilities for websites. I’d dabbled a bit with Quarto for PDF documents and websites (including A geographer’s introduction to QGIS & R) after using RMarkdown for several years. Quarto looked ideal, so I started experimenting with it. It is plain text, and can work with GitHub, which I am using fairly regularly.

Quarto also has a very good website, with lots of examples including creating a website https://quarto.org/docs/websites/ and you can also choose from a variety of different themes https://bootswatch.com/.

After various rounds of development, I came up with this site, https://nickbearman.github.io/. It is (I hope) a simple site which has what I need on it. It also supports blogs, which I do contribute to semi-regularly. It is also all static pages, so once it is updated it can just sit there and doesn’t need any database provision or anything else to run. The new site also incorporated a search, which is handy.

You can host it through GitHub Pages, and there are various options to automatically compile it using continuous integration, but I decided to keep things simple, to compile the site locally and the push to GitHub. Sometimes the potential to automate things isn’t worth the time to set it up!

from https://xkcd.com/1205 CC license

Transferring my blog posts from WordPress (geospatialtrainingsolutions.co.uk and nickbearman.me.uk) was a bit of a faff but it is getting there. It is a work in progress. I have found a semi-automated way of doing this, but it will still take some time. I’m also trying to extract a static copy of the WordPress sites for archiving, with the Simpy Static WordPress plugin looking useful.

I also used to have a contact form, which I received some useful contacts through so I wanted to include this. Quarto as such doesn’t include such a form, as there is no interaction, but I had a brainwave and decided to use a Google Forms instead. We’ve used these a lot at OSGeo:UK and they work really well.

I hope you found this useful - do let me know what you think!

And if you want to learn more about GIS, checkout my new Training Courses page and if you want a bespoke course, make use of my new Contact Form!