This Blog’s Setup

How this blog is built: Quarto, custom listing template, full-text search, and a few CSS tweaks.

Since this is a developer blog, it seems right to write about how it’s built.

The stack

• Quarto — static site generator with first-class support for code, notebooks, and technical writing
• GitHub Pages — hosting
• Custom CSS — theme overrides on top of Quarto’s cosmo base

No JavaScript frameworks, no build pipeline, no node_modules folder of shame.

Why Quarto

I wanted something that handles code blocks well by default, can render math if I ever need it, and doesn’t require me to fight the tooling to write a simple post.

Quarto fits. It’s opinionated enough to get out of the way, but extensible enough that I could build exactly the listing style I wanted.

The listing page

Quarto’s default post listing moves the title around depending on whether there’s a thumbnail image. I didn’t want that. A custom EJS template gives full control over the HTML:

listing:
  template: listing.ejs
  fields: [date, title, description, categories]

The template is about 20 lines of straightforward HTML with EJS interpolation.

Search

Full-text search comes for free with Quarto — just set type: overlay in the search config and it indexes all your content automatically using Fuse.js.

search:
  location: navbar
  type: overlay

That’s most of it. The rest is CSS.