Falling down the #Quarto rabbit hole, and enjoying it so far. Experimenting with it as a blog and electronic lab notebook, and am keen on the idea of having raw data + analysis + presentation cleanly in the same version-controlled repository to enable understanding and reproducibility (in my work raw data can be on the order of 10s of megabytes).
Wanting to add some more interactivity to published work in a static site, to work client-side (as a sort of interactive "paper").
I am learning the limitations of python for this purpose, which is the only programming language I use on a regular basis. I don't want to need a server to host some remote kernel or equivalent to do simple calculations on, and I don't want to learn a niche language/API either (like some of the options here: https://quarto.org/docs/interactive/)
I then thought of two of the best explanatory science blogs I've seen, which are completely JavaScript, it appears (never really knew what JavaScript was before)...
The first being Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog, with beautifully done interactive visualizations and clear explanations of a number of everyday technologies, from bikes, to combustion engines, optics, watches, etc.
Really excellent work here - imagine if academic papers were more like this, and less like ~ jumbled up PDFs ~
The second being Prof Steven Abbott's website, where he has a prolific amount of academically and industrally-relevant calculators, explanations, literal books - all CC-licensed, on topics from statistical thermodynamics to literal paint drying.
So, this is all to say I am going to stick to what I know (python), and try to learn the minimum amount of JavaScript possible to add a bit of interactivity to future blog posts, hoping to cover something related to * something * science-y.
Prof Abbott even has a development tool, seemingly aimed at my use case: https://www.stevenabbott.co.uk/app-writer.php
I don't know how to then get the JavaScript back into Quarto's HTML output but I reckon that won't be the hard part 😅
Kirk Smith, PhD