Reaching the top of a mountain. Finishing a difficult level in a video game. Finally defeating the boss. That’s how it felt when this website went live after weeks of trial and error. It’s working!
How did I get to publishing this website in the first place?
Two main motivating factors.
First, a lot of the data I work with in my full time job[1] is grim. I try to keep things clinical, but it sometimes gets to me a bit after spending day after day looking at anonymized data that documents how the U.S. immigration system grinds people down. Those numbers echo with violence. I wanted to work with something a bit more benign.
The second reason is a bit more selfish. As anyone who has worked anywhere can testify, it’s nice to have a venue where you yourself have the autonomy to make decisions about the way things look and function. No title caps in the title of blog posts. Make it so.
So, I needed an outlet. At the encouragement of my colleague, Austin, I started to put together this website. This is the result: a turn toward subject matter that is adjacent to some of my personal and professional interests, but on a lighter note. Process-wise, I wanted more control than what some build-a-blog sites give you. Whenever you make something yourself, you know the ins-and-outs of it a bit better and can fine-tune those little specifications to exactly the setting you want.
Fake shortcuts distracted me from the righteous path
Sometimes, short cuts in racing video games are not actually short cuts. Those routes lengthen the course and slow down your racer’s time. I went down one of these fake short cuts in the creation of this website.
I was introduced to R during my grad school days at The University of Texas at Dallas. In it’s basic form, it is a statistical program that has a programming language preferred by my data scientists and academics. The community has since applied R to built out methods of building websites, blogs, and dashboards. Doing some googling, I discovered the package Blogdown along with some recipes for how to build a blog. Never in my life have I created a distributed R package for public use, so I have significant respect Alison Presmanes Hill, Amber Thomas, and Yihui Xie for putting this package together.
It started out ok. Instructions helped to hook R up to Github and then to Netlify. It was easy enough to set up the About page. But anytime I tried to adjust and start the draft to render to production cycle, things started breaking. You could choose to render markdown documents to html or make them Rmarkdown documents first, but it didn’t work. I kept on getting Netlify’s error message. This process slowed me down, not just from a tech perspective, but from a motivational side. It was a side-quest that had bogged me down.[2]
After a bit of self-pity and doubt, I picked myself back up again and started looking for alternatives. The Posit:R conference to be held in August will have a dedicated workshop for a blog-building package that I had vaguely heard of before: Quarto. If it’s getting a dedicated space at R’s main conference here in 2024, then it must be the current thing going. I started looking around and indeed, some of the buginess of the Blogdown steps have been smoothed out.
Quarto has streamlined and fine-tuned a lot of the friction points that were present in blogdown. Pandocs, a document converter, is now utilized for the workflow of rendering the markdown files. The directory system is now more straightforward in my mind and less breakable. I’m looking forward to applying it on future projects.
What will I be doing on this website?
My first project is a study the globalization of athlete participation across the major professional sports. More athletes from more countries are participating at the highest, most elite levels of a greater diversity of sporting competition.[3] My first entry in this project covers the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the years between 1992-2024. Some maps, some tables, some viz. I’m experimenting. More leagues to come.
Let me know what you think. If you are interested in connecting about the substance or the process, DM me or email me at asawyer.asj at gmail.com
#### Resources
-https://albert-rapp.de/posts/13_quarto_blog_writing_guide/13_quarto_blog_writing_guide.html
-https://www.incidentalfindings.org/posts/2022-08-30_from-blogdown-to-quarto/
-https://www.apreshill.com/blog/2022-04-we-dont-talk-about-quarto/
[1]I work at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. We analyze public record data received from the United States federal government and provide tools that can sort it. Kind of like those sports reference websites. Think about TRAC as “FedRef” and you won’t go too far wrong.
[2] This blog post by Joseph Chou summarizes some of the reasons people transitioned from Blogdown to Quarto. If I had read this earlier on, it would have saved me so much time!
[3] I have a thesis about how this affects society, but I’m going to let it marinate a bit first before presenting that dish to the table.