www.itkservices3.com

[davidleitch1]

Description

Thought it was worth mentioning the website that I've built using Quarto over the past 18 months. it features several Holoviz Panel apps including a live update of 5 minute electricity prices in the NEM in Australia, a front page diary/blog on electricity and a series of notes/articles composed in Typora for the most part , because Typora is particularly good at markdown img management. Images (graphs, tables, screen shots) are such an important part of my work as an analyst.

The site also features, for long form articles on the site, unmoderated comments using Isso, an open source comment manager running, as do the Panel apps, off my own server (behind cloudflare tunnels).

Early on thanks to Quarto existing options I chose Netlify to host the site and that's so far proved a sound choice. For the longest time every update used quarto publish netlify and as the site has grown that's become a slowish process.

Now when I update the front page blog I can run a little Netlify server function via a shell script that Claude wrote for me that renders the blog and just updates that Netlify content. Relatively fast and easy and that means I will update the front page blog more rapidly.

I dont really want my site to be visited by everyone. It's designed to be useful and as a record not to make money. Quarto though does let me publish the posts offering a word download option and I use that to send my articles off to another site www.reneweconomy.com.au that does want the advertising etc revenue.

In general thanks to Quarto I have been able to move, as I think most of us are, away from .pdf .docx to .html where one uses mark down to write content that is primarily consumed on the web. It's a faster, better and more sustainable way of communicating with hyper links, lighthouse and all the other web technology.

When I started this I knew next to nothing about Quarto, mark down or Holoviz Panel and my limits still show up quickly. AI in the form of ChatGPT and Claude have greatly expanded my confidence and willingness to tackle stuff. For instance the 5 minute electricity price app sends an SMS to me and a couple of others when electricity prices go over $1000. I'd never have had the ambition to do that a few years ago.

So my thanks to the developers and maintainers of Quarto its been a lot of fun so far and I hope it continues.

https://itkservices3.com