Building digital gardens with QUARTZ – Static Feedback #9
AI Summary
Episode Summary: Interview with Jackie Z, Creator of Quartz
- Introduction
- Guest: Jackie Z, creator of Quartz
- Topic: Opinionated static site generators and digital gardening
- Digital Gardening
- Jackie’s history with online publishing and the concept of digital gardening
- Digital gardening as an incremental, maintenance-based approach to note-taking
- Embraces work-in-progress mentality, reducing pressure for perfection
- Quartz Development
- Quartz as a 2020 project, initially a Hugo theme
- Integration with Obsidian for note-taking and publishing
- Quartz’s philosophy: accessible to non-technical users, highly customizable for developers
- Community Contributions
- Community involvement with plugin development
- Examples: D&D formatting, GitHub comments, breadcrumb navigation, file explorer
- Information Architecture
- Different organizational systems: chronological, folder-based, graph-based
- Graph-based approach used in Quartz, allowing for backlinks and associative connections
- Technical Aspects
- Handling links and paths, using nominal typing for accuracy
- Markdown processing and transformation into HTML/JSX
- Single Page App (SPA) functionality for seamless navigation
- Use Cases
- Educators creating course syllabi
- Research papers and PhD dissertations published using Quartz
- D&D campaign wikis and video game lore sites
- Future of Quartz
- Performance improvements, including dependency tracing and markdown parsing optimization
- Potential rewrite in a lower-level language like Rust for speed
- Enhancing user experience with better JavaScript bundling and component hydration
- Closing Thoughts
- Open source software’s impact on sharing knowledge and enabling creativity