….wait for it!
Christian Wittmann ! We’ve never actually met but I think I might owe you a drink! If you are ever in Krakow look me up :)
As a data science noob (I’m working my way through the fast.ai course under the guidance of Jeremy Howard, starting a blog seemed like a great way to integrate into the community and also to document the learning journey ahead.
I did look at fastpages, but a new contender Quarto caught my eye.
I follow the fast.ai course using Jupyter Notebooks installed on my Linux box, and the go to Quarto tutorial is perfectly fine for getting nicely rendered Jupyter Notebooks, but how to get these into a blog?
Again, the documentation provided by Quarto is fine, but you won’t see Jupyter in the Quick Start setup.
After multiple, and ultimately abortive attempts to deploy via GitHub (I created and deleted SO many repositories) I did manage to get something up and running using Netlify, but that just adds another step in the chain.
If only there was a way to work on Notebooks within Jupyter and blog my findings, all under the same roof! Sounds too good to be true.
Well the good news is that it IS possible thanks to this post which has made this blog post (my first ever) possible!
The key takeaway for me from reading Christian’s blog was these two steps, which although referred to in the Quarto docs are not very clear.
Two final activities are needed to finalize the setup of your repo:
Create a new branch called gh-pages. To do this, go to your branches (for me that is https://github.com/Stephen137/Stephen137.github.io/branches), and create the new branch by clicking the “New branch”- button in the top right.
Set the new branch as the branch for GitHub Pages. In your repo, navigate to Settings -> Pages. (In my repo that takes me to https://github.com/Stephen137/Stephen137.github.io/settings/pages.) Change main to gh-pages.
I have run into soooo many obstacles over the first few weeks of my transition into data science, but I have also learned so much in a short space of time. For any fellow newcomers, my advice is to be tenacious. Do your research, but when (not if) you hit a wall, don’t be afraid to reach out. The fast.ai forums is a great place to hang out.The community is really so collaborative.
Now that I have my own blogging platform, I’ll try to retrace my steps and post some useful insights.
Have a great weekend all :)