Transitioning my Website to Hugo

For the past several years, I’ve built my personal website using Quarto. Before that, I was using Rmarkdown. So the transition to Quarto wasn’t really even a switch in philosophy; rather, it was more like upgrading to a different piece of software that did basically the same thing…only better.

Recently, though, I decided I wanted to simplify my website, and part of this simplification entails switching from Quarto to Hugo to build my site.

The motivating factor for me here is that I simply don’t need all of the features that Quarto offers to create the site that I want now. When I first created my personal website, maybe 7 years ago, I was doing a lot of blogging that involved data analysis. I would find a dataset – often one part of the TidyTuesday project – and work my way through a handful of analyses. My intentions here were twofold. First, I used these blog posts as a way to improve my coding in R. I might use a given dataset to learn more about ggplot themes, or I might use one to gain practice fitting multilevel models, or to practice with the {purrr} package.

Second, I used these posts as a way both to network and build a portfolio. Before Elon’s takeover of Twitter, the #rstats community over there was vibrant, and participating in #TidyTuesday – or else just posting any of your R content – was a great way to meet similarly-minded people.

Fast-forward to 2026, though, and I’m less interested in writing regular data-analysis blog posts anymore, whether using R or Python or Julia or any other language. I’m still constantly trying to improve my proficiency in all of those languages, but I’ve been doing so through other means (such as maintaining Brain, my personal notes site, or regularly working on coding “katas”).

And so I don’t really need all of the capabilities Quarto offers for my personal site anymore. This isn’t meant as a knock against Quarto – I still use it regularly to create reports at work. But I’ve used Hugo to create other sites before, and given my current needs, it just feels like a better fit. It’s simpler and faster, which is what I want right now. And if I ever feel compelled to write a “data-analysis” flavored blog post, it’s only moderately more work to do so.

If you want to check out my old site, I have it archived here.