By Natalie van Dis | July 1, 2024
The Member Engagement Committee runs Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance on SORTEE’s Slack. For more information, see SORTEE’s Code Club page.
In June’s Code Club session, Steffi LaZerte hosted a workshop on how to code our own website. By walking participants through the code underlying her own website, she showed us how to use Markdown and Quarto to create and host a website on GitHub.
Three steps to creating a website
Steffi boiled down making your own website to three steps:
- Creating the content and format and converting them to HTML files on your local machine.
- Hosting the HTML files on a server. Steffi showed us how to do this for free using GitHub pages.
- Linking your website to a domain name (optional).
Missed Code club? You can read Steffi’s roadmap for getting started with GitHub websites on her blog.
Markdown and Quarto
There are many different ways to create a website, but to start, Steffi advised us to use Markdown language in the Quarto publishing system.
You can start a website from scratch fairly simply in RStudio by creating a new R project and selecting ‘Quarto website’. This will create a basic website that you can instantly view on your local machine. Steffi: “Start basic and small, and bit by bit build up your website over time.”
And draw inspiration from the websites of fellow SORTEE members! Tips from Steffi: “If you are curious about how someone managed certain formatting on their website, you can check their underlying _quarto.yml document and look at the outline and styles included. To see how a website uses css/scss styles, right click on the web page and click ‘Inspect’ (FireFox/Google Chrome) to have a look at the underlying HTML code”.
What’s next
Code Club will go on a 2-month Conference/Holiday break, so there will be no meetings in July and August. We will be back with a Training Session on Tuesday, September 17. Topic and time to be announced on SORTEE’s Slack.
You can check the Code Club schedule here for upcoming meetings. To receive calendar invites in your local time zone, sign up here.
Suggest a topic
To propose a Code Club meeting topic, please use this form.