New website and more !
Hello dear readers and, for those of you who found this post in time, welcome back to my new brand website and blog !
Finally, after a few months of stop due to some technical issues with my older website version which could not successfully render (damn you Hugo updates!), I have finally decided to re-construct my website from scratch. Indeed, after figuring out that making the website conform to the new Hugo updates would have required me basically the same amount of time, if not more, than building it anew, I embraced myself and build a new website that you should be abkle to see now.
All previous posts and information that were put on the older website can still be found here, although they will not be updated anymore. I tried my best to also copy all previous posts and key information, tutorials, etc … and adapt them to my new website so that you should be able to find any previous sections in this website too. I took quite a lot of effort and I had to find time during the weekend and in other relaxed moments of my workday in order to have the new website build and ready to go.
I also took this unfortunate chance as an opportunity to learn something new, that is, how to use Quarto, an open-source scientific and technical publishing system, and combine it with R and Markdown to create presentations, blogs, and even websites! At first I was bit hesitant to learn from scratch a new way system but, after some initial effort, I am really glad to have learned this new way of creating different types of academic output. Some key advantages of learning Quarto compared to simple Markdown are:
Creation of dynamic content with different software, such as
RAbility to publish reproducible, production quality articles, presentations, dashboards, websites, blogs, and books in different formats, e.g. HTML, PDF, and even MS Word.
Ability to write using Pandoc markdown, including equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layout, and more.
These are only some summary elements that make learning Quarto a quite cost-effective approach to produce different types of output and, especially in the academic context, I can really see the advantages of using such a system,
Every time is the same story, when something new comes out it can be quite scary to embrace due to familiarity with old system, fear of initial learning costs, etc… However, if the product is valid, then you can immediately see the advantages of using the new system and almost forget how much you were doubtful of it at the beginning. This happened to me countless times, with R, RStudio, LaTeX, R Markdown, and now Quarto. In all cases, I must say that in the end I turned out quite fine with using all of these tools. I like progress !!!
I hope you will enjoy my new website in the future, as I plan to expand it even more in the upcoming months: starting from continuing to add some past content from the previous website (especially the missing data methods review of which I am quite proud), to create new sections for dedicated topics (e.g. perhaps on IRT?), to take advantage of Quarto’s functionalities to make the website’s content even more interactive and new. If you have suggestions on what to do next, feel free to let me know your feedback.
Finally, I want to give an update on my upcoming conferences that I plan to attend in the next months:
The first one is the bi-annual EuHEA conference, which this year will be hosted in Vienna, and for which my abstract for presentation has already been accepted. In addition, I found out that I will also be (for the first time) chair of my parallel session, i.e. I will need to manage the organisation of the room and speakers’ turn, while also being the last speaker of the session. Although this may not seem a too complex task to accomplish, I am actually quite thrilled to make this new experience. As for my presentation, the topic will be my
Rpackage missingHE, which I have recently updated with some new functions that I will summarise in my talk.The second one is the ICTMC conference which this year will take place in Edinburgh. This conference is a bit broader compared to EuHEA as it is related to methodology and statistics in clinical trials, rather than simply health economics. I already presented once my work here, although as a postdoc I think, but I plan to present a new project I have been working on the past year. The work is still undergoing but I should be able to present some preliminary results and I am looking forward to receive some feedback from the audience, especially from statisticians. However, there is still some uncertainty about whether I will be able to present as abstract notification will be available only from July 1st, well fingers crossed !!!.
