Introduction
I decided to also make the list available as a project on the corresponding page in the GitHub repository.
As I’m writing this, Quarto has surpassed other website-building packages in popularity (3,400 ★), such as blogdown (1,700 ★) and distill (400 ★). Given Quarto’s growing popularity, I took the initiative to compile a list of websites that use it. This way, data analysts who use other website-building methods (e.g., distill, blogdown) will have the opportunity to see the capabilities of a Quarto page. Furthermore, this list may also help those who have already added Quarto to their toolkit, as they’ll be able to draw inspiration from a collection of relevant examples.
Unfortunately, as is probably already obvious, this list cannot possibly include every Quarto website. For the most part, these are sites I’ve come across and liked. If you know of another site, or even your own, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message, and I’ll add it as soon as possible.
Inspiration
A few years ago, I decided to build a website so I’d have a single place to showcase my projects instead of having them scattered across various repositories on GitHub. So I tried out several solutions that needed to support Rmd files (R Markdown files). In the end, I settled on using {distill}, and honestly, I loved it, as the site combined simplicity with features that made it look quite professional. Despite any issues there were with this theme (many of which were resolved with Quarto), I was quite satisfied. However, at that time I was a beginner programmer with limited knowledge of HTML and CSS. This meant that I could make only minor modifications, which would take me a very long time. Around the same time, I discovered a list of Distill websites. With this list, I was able to:
- understand Distill’s capabilities and limitations
- find motivation to create a page, getting ideas from others’ pages
- easily access to interesting page features accompanied by the corresponding code page
In 2022, Quarto was announced, and the process of writing and publishing articles, reports, and websites changed significantly. Several Distill users decided to make the switch and are already using Quarto for their personal websites (a finding based on a comparison with the list of Distill pages). Some may still be hesitant about this change, as Quarto is fairly new and there may be significant issues that have not yet been resolved. An additional hurdle is the time required to learn how to use it, since its documentation, although extensive, can seem daunting to a novice user. That is precisely why I believe this list is important to make Quarto more accessible to new users and to encourage existing users to adopt new features.
List of Quarto Sites
An indicative list of websites using Quarto is as follows:
Multilingual Websites
Unfortunately, Quarto does not have built-in support for websites in different languages. This may pose a problem for those who wish to promote their content in their native language, which may differ from English. Currently, the solution officially offered by Quarto is through project profiles, but its implementation seems quite complex to me, and there is very little mention of this specific use case in the documentation. If you’re interested in developments regarding Quarto’s multilingual support, you can check out the discussion on this topic on the project’s GitHub page. So far, officially, Quarto does not explicitly support multilingual websites, e-books, and so on.
Although there is no official support from Quarto, babelquarto was created, an R package that aims to solve this problem and make creating multilingual pages possible and easy. There are some websites that have already integrated {babelquarto} into their toolkit and now feature pages in multiple languages. One of them is the website you’re reading right now! You can find its code here. Another great example of a multilingual page (Japanese/English) is Joel Nitta’s site and its corresponding repository.
I hope you found all of this interesting, and who knows, maybe it’ll even inspire you to build your own website with Quarto.