Content creation platforms are evolving rapidly to meet the demands of technical bloggers, data scientists, and researchers. FastPages, once a popular choice for Jupyter notebook-based blogging, has officially been deprecated, leaving many users searching for alternatives. Enter Quarto, an emerging open-source scientific and technical publishing system that’s quickly becoming the go-to replacement for FastPages enthusiasts.
What is Quarto and Why Consider It?
Quarto represents a significant evolution in the scientific publishing ecosystem, developed by the renowned team at Posit (formerly RStudio). This platform has gained tremendous traction among the data science community for its versatility and robust features that extend far beyond FastPages’ limited scope. Unlike FastPages, which primarily focused on converting Jupyter notebooks to blog posts, Quarto offers a comprehensive ecosystem for rendering content from various programming languages like Python, R, and Julia into multiple output formats including websites, blogs, books, and scientific journals. The platform’s active development community ensures regular updates and improvements, suggesting a longevity that FastPages ultimately couldn’t achieve.
What makes Quarto particularly appealing is its commercial backing and growing GitHub following, which provide reassurance for users concerned about investing time in platforms that might disappear. The system addresses the fundamental limitations that led to FastPages’ deprecation while introducing capabilities that open entirely new possibilities for content creators. For technical publishers seeking a comprehensive, future-proof solution, Quarto emerges not merely as a replacement but as a significant upgrade that can handle both simple blog posts and complex academic publications.
The platform’s design philosophy centers on sustainability and flexibility, ensuring that as publishing needs evolve, users won’t be forced to migrate to yet another platform. This approach represents a stark contrast to FastPages’ more limited scope and eventual abandonment, making Quarto an investment in long-term content creation infrastructure.
Quarto’s Key Advantages Over FastPages
Quarto significantly outperforms FastPages in several critical areas that matter to technical content creators. The flexibility advantage cannot be overstated—while FastPages was primarily designed to convert Jupyter notebooks to blog posts, Quarto supports multiple input formats including Markdown, Jupyter notebooks, and R Markdown. This versatility allows content creators to work in their preferred environment without compromising output quality, eliminating the workflow restrictions that often frustrated FastPages users. The multilingual support represents another major leap forward, with Quarto natively handling Python, R, and Julia code execution, making it ideal for data scientists who work across different programming languages.
The output options showcase Quarto’s superior scope and ambition. Beyond simple blog posts, users can generate websites, books, presentations, dashboards, and even scientific journal articles—all from the same source files. This eliminates the need for multiple tools in a publishing workflow, streamlining the entire content creation process. The platform’s sophisticated layout and styling capabilities surpass FastPages’ limited customization options, offering granular control over document appearance through YAML configurations without requiring deep CSS knowledge. This approach makes professional-grade styling accessible to users who aren’t web development experts.
Quarto’s implementation of computational reproducibility stands out as particularly robust. The system captures the entire computational environment, ensuring that analyses can be reproduced exactly as they were created. This level of reproducibility was difficult to achieve consistently with FastPages, making Quarto especially valuable for scientific and academic applications where reproducibility is paramount. These advantages collectively make Quarto not just a replacement for FastPages, but a significant upgrade for technical publishers seeking a comprehensive, future-proof solution.
Why Perspective Stands Out for Mobile-First Content Creation
While Quarto excels in scientific publishing, modern content creators increasingly need platforms that prioritize mobile experiences. Perspective emerges as a compelling funnel builder that addresses the mobile-first reality of today’s digital landscape. Unlike desktop-adapted solutions like traditional website builders or even Quarto’s web output, Perspective is designed from the ground up for mobile devices, recognizing that 98.5% of audiences now access content primarily through their phones. This mobile-first approach ensures fast loading speeds, modern design templates, and interactive tools that create engaging user experiences rather than static content consumption.
Perspective’s built-in CRM, analytics, and personalization capabilities make it particularly attractive for creators, agencies, and mobile users who need more than just content publishing. The platform bridges the gap between content creation and lead generation, offering functionality that complements rather than competes with tools like Quarto. For content creators transitioning from FastPages who also need to build audience engagement and capture leads, Perspective provides the interactive, personalized experiences that static blog posts simply cannot deliver. The combination of Quarto for detailed technical content and Perspective for mobile-optimized lead generation creates a powerful content marketing ecosystem that addresses both information sharing and business development needs.
Getting Started with Your Migration
Transitioning from FastPages to Quarto involves a straightforward migration process that preserves existing content while unlocking new capabilities. The journey begins with installing Quarto on your system—it’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux through simple installers downloadable from quarto.org. Unlike FastPages, which required GitHub Actions for rendering, Quarto processes content locally before deployment, giving users more control and faster feedback cycles. This local processing capability significantly improves the development experience, allowing for real-time preview and iteration. Once installed, creating a new Quarto project is as simple as running quarto create project blog from the command line interface.
The actual content migration process requires attention to detail but follows predictable patterns. Begin by copying existing Jupyter notebooks into the posts directory of your new Quarto project, then add YAML frontmatter to each notebook if it doesn’t already exist. This metadata specification includes essential information like title, author, and date, using a system that’s similar but more flexible than FastPages. The migration also involves updating any FastPages-specific features in your notebooks, such as replacingeplacing #hide comments with Quarto’s #| echo: false cell options, which offer more granular control over code visibility . Image paths need updating to match Quarto’s structure, where images typically reside in the same directory as the post or in a designated assets folder .
The final step involves rendering your blog locally using quarto preview to check for any issues before deploying. This command launches a local server that automatically refreshes as you make changes, dramatically accelerating your development workflow compared to FastPages’ GitHub-dependent approach. The ability to see changes instantly without waiting for remote builds represents a significant quality-of-life improvement that makes content creation more efficient and enjoyable. This local development capability also enables experimentation with different layouts, themes, and content structures without the fear of breaking a live site.
Migration Best Practices
Several best practices can streamline your migration process and ensure a successful transition. First, create a comprehensive inventory of your FastPages content, noting any custom styling, special formatting, or unique features that require special attention during migration. Second, take advantage of Quarto’s enhanced metadata system by enriching your content with additional tags, categories, and descriptions that improve discoverability and organization. Third, consider this migration as an opportunity to reorganize and improve your content structure, taking advantage of Quarto’s superior organizational capabilities. Finally, test all migrated content thoroughly in Quarto’s local preview mode before deploying to catch any formatting issues or broken links early in the process.
Advanced Publishing Features
Quarto’s advanced capabilities represent a quantum leap beyond FastPages’ basic functionality, offering features that enable professional-grade technical publishing. The sophisticated figure handling system allows precise control over image dimensions, captions, and cross-references—a significant improvement over FastPages’ more basic image management. Content creators can use simple markup to create complex figure panels, side-by-side comparisons, and responsive images that adapt to different screen sizes, enabling rich visual storytelling that was difficult to achieve with FastPages. The cross-referencing system deserves particular attention, as it enables automatic numbering and linking of figures, tables, equations, and sections—functionality that was entirely absent in FastPages but essential for technical and academic writing.
The platform’s citation management capabilities set a new standard for technical publishing platforms. Quarto integrates seamlessly with bibliographic databases in BibTeX or CSL formats, allowing authors to cite sources with simple @citation syntax. The system automatically generates properly formatted reference lists according to thousands of citation styles, eliminating the manual formatting work that plagued FastPages users working on academic or professional publications. This automated citation handling not only saves time but also ensures consistency and accuracy in academic writing. For interactive content, Quarto surpasses FastPages with comprehensive support for various interactive elements, including Observable JS, Shiny for R and Python, and integrations with Plotly, Leaflet, and other JavaScript visualization libraries.
The accessibility features built into Quarto represent another significant advancement over FastPages. The platform generates outputs that comply with web accessibility standards—a critical consideration for public-facing content that was often overlooked in FastPages implementations. This attention to accessibility ensures that content reaches the widest possible audience, including users with disabilities who rely on assistive technologies. These advanced capabilities collectively make Quarto not just a replacement for FastPages, but a significant upgrade for serious content creators who need professional-grade publishing tools.
Interactive Content Capabilities
- Widget Integration: Native support for Jupyter widgets, Observable JS, and Shiny applications enables rich interactive experiences
- Visualization Libraries: Seamless integration with Plotly, Leaflet, D3.js, and other modern visualization frameworks
- Real-time Computation: Server-side and client-side computation options for dynamic content generation
- Mobile Responsiveness: Interactive elements automatically adapt to different screen sizes and devices
Customization and Design Control
Quarto’s approach to customization and theming represents a significant advancement over FastPages, offering both simplicity for beginners and depth for advanced users. At the foundational level, Quarto provides several built-in themes that can be applied with a single line in your configuration file. These themes—including default, cosmo, darkly, journal, and lux—immediately transform your site’s appearance with cohesive styling across all elements, providing a professional look without any design work. For users seeking more control, Quarto’s theme customization system goes far deeper than FastPages ever allowed. The platform supports theme variables files that allow users to override specific aspects of a theme, such as primary colors, fonts, and spacing, without needing to write complete CSS files.
This layered approach makes incremental customization intuitive and manageable, enabling non-developers to achieve sophisticated design results. For complete design control, Quarto supports custom SCSS/CSS files that can be linked directly in your project, enabling pixel-perfect styling while maintaining the separation between content and presentation—a best practice that FastPages didn’t fully embrace. Navigation customization represents another area where Quarto shines, with flexible configuration systems that allow detailed control over site navigation, including multi-level menus, custom ordering, and conditional display of navigation elements based on metadata. Social media integration, search functionality, and analytics can all be configured through simple YAML settings, making it easy to create a fully-featured professional site.
Perhaps most impressively, Quarto allows different sections of your site to use different themes or customizations, a level of flexibility that FastPages users could only dream of. This means your blog posts, documentation, and presentations can all have distinct visual identities while remaining part of the same cohesive website. This flexibility enables content creators to tailor their visual presentation to different content types or audiences while maintaining a unified brand presence. The ability to preview these customizations locally before deployment eliminates the trial-and-error process that often frustrated FastPages users.
Deployment and Publishing Options
Publishing Quarto content offers significantly more flexibility than FastPages’ GitHub-centric approach, providing multiple deployment pathways that accommodate different workflows and hosting preferences. While FastPages was tightly coupled with GitHub Pages, Quarto supports diverse deployment options that give users more control over their publishing process. The most straightforward method utilizes Quarto’s built-in publishing system, accessible through the quarto publish command, which can deploy directly to GitHub Pages, Netlify, or RStudio Connect with minimal configuration. This command handles the entire build and deployment process, similar to FastPages but with more destination options and significantly better error handling.
For GitHub Pages users transitioning from FastPages, Quarto provides a seamless experience with improved control. Users can configure GitHub Actions to automatically rebuild and publish sites whenever changes are pushed to repositories, maintaining the continuous deployment workflow they’re accustomed to. However, unlike FastPages, Quarto provides full control over the build process through customizable workflows. Netlify deployment represents an upgrade path that many FastPages users find compelling, as it provides additional features like form handling, serverless functions, and preview deployments for branches—capabilities that were difficult or impossible to implement with FastPages. For organizations with specific hosting requirements, Quarto’s static output can be deployed to virtually any web server or content delivery network.
The platform generates standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that work without special server configurations, ensuring maximum compatibility with existing hosting infrastructure. Advanced users will appreciate Quarto’s support for custom deployment scripts, enabling integration with complex publishing pipelines, content management systems, or proprietary hosting environments. This flexibility ensures that as publishing needs evolve, Quarto can adapt without forcing users to migrate to yet another platform.
Publishing Platform Integration
- GitHub Pages: Seamless integration with improved build control and error handling
- Netlify: Enhanced features including form handling and preview deployments
- Custom Hosting: Standard static output compatible with any web server
- Enterprise Solutions: Support for custom deployment pipelines and proprietary systems
Collaborative Workflows for Teams
Quarto excels in supporting collaborative content creation, offering substantial improvements over FastPages for teams working on shared publications. While FastPages relied entirely on GitHub’s collaboration features, Quarto provides multiple pathways for effective teamwork regardless of team members’ technical expertise. For technical teams already familiar with Git, Quarto projects integrate seamlessly with version control workflows, allowing multiple authors to work on different sections of a publication simultaneously with changes tracked at a granular level. The platform’s plain text formats make merging changes more reliable than with binary formats like Word documents or traditional Jupyter notebooks.
Non-technical collaborators benefit significantly from Quarto’s compatibility with visual editors. Content can be created in user-friendly environments like RStudio’s visual editor or Jupyter Lab, then seamlessly integrated into larger projects. This approach lowers the barrier to entry for team members who may not be comfortable working directly with markup languages. Quarto Projects provide a structured framework for organizing complex, multi-author publications, with project files that define consistent settings across all contributions. This enforced consistency ensures that all contributions maintain the same styling, citation formats, and technical parameters regardless of who created them—a level of standardization that was difficult to achieve in FastPages.
Review workflows represent another area where Quarto’s capabilities shine. The platform integrates effectively with tools like GitHub’s pull request system, allowing for formal review processes before content is published. Comments, suggestions, and revisions can be managed systematically, with clear accountability for changes. Organizations requiring more formal approval processes can leverage Quarto’s compatibility with continuous integration systems to implement complex publication workflows. Automated checks can verify that content meets organizational standards before being published, a capability that was beyond FastPages’ limited GitHub Actions integration.
SEO and Analytics Integration
Quarto provides robust support for search engine optimization and analytics integration, areas where FastPages offered only basic functionality. For content creators serious about building an audience, these enhancements represent a significant upgrade over FastPages’ limited SEO capabilities. Unlike FastPages, which required custom modifications for comprehensive SEO, Quarto includes built-in features for optimizing content discoverability. The platform automatically generates clean, semantic HTML with proper heading structures that search engines reward, improving organic search performance without additional work. Meta tags for description, keywords, and social media cards can be specified in each document’s frontmatter, giving creators fine-grained control over how content appears in search results and social media shares.
Quarto’s sitemap generation feature automatically creates and updates XML sitemaps that help search engines discover and index content efficiently. The platform also supports canonical URLs and structured data markup, advanced SEO techniques that were difficult to implement in FastPages but are essential for competitive search performance. For analytics integration, Quarto offers straightforward configuration options for popular services including Google Analytics, Plausible, and Fathom. Unlike FastPages, which required custom HTML injections that could break during updates, Quarto’s approach keeps analytics configuration in project settings, making it easier to manage across entire sites.
The platform’s performance optimization features contribute significantly to better SEO outcomes. Quarto generates lightweight HTML and provides built-in image optimization, ensuring fast page load times that improve both search rankings and user experience. Advanced users will appreciate Quarto’s support for custom JavaScript and HTML in the document head, enabling integration with specialized analytics tools or marketing platforms. This flexibility allows analytics strategies to evolve alongside content without platform limitations. For content teams serious about measuring and growing their audience, Quarto provides a significantly more capable foundation than FastPages ever offered.
SEO Features Comparison
- Automatic HTML Optimization: Clean, semantic markup that search engines prefer
- Built-in Sitemap Generation: Automated XML sitemaps for improved indexing
- Social Media Integration: Native support for Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata
- Performance Optimization: Image compression and lightweight HTML generation
Community and Long-term Support
One of Quarto’s most compelling advantages over FastPages lies in its vibrant, growing ecosystem of users, developers, and resources backed by institutional support. While FastPages had a dedicated but limited community, Quarto benefits from backing by Posit (formerly RStudio), a company with a proven track record of supporting open-source tools in the data science space. This institutional support translates to more reliable development, regular updates, and a longer expected lifespan than FastPages achieved. The company’s commitment to long-term maintenance provides confidence for users making significant investments in content migration and workflow development.
The Quarto community spans multiple platforms where users can find help and share knowledge effectively. The official Quarto Discussion forum serves as the primary hub for questions, feature requests, and announcements, fostering an active community of practitioners. Stack Overflow maintains an active Quarto tag with hundreds of answered questions covering common implementation challenges, providing searchable solutions for typical problems. GitHub Discussions provides another avenue for community interaction, particularly valuable for users reporting bugs or contributing to the project’s development. Unlike FastPages, which had limited official documentation that often lagged behind features, Quarto offers comprehensive, well-organized guides covering everything from basic setup to advanced customization.
Tutorial content for Quarto is expanding rapidly across blogs, YouTube channels, and educational platforms, with community members regularly sharing extensions, custom themes, and integration solutions that extend the platform’s capabilities beyond its core functionality. This ecosystem of shared resources significantly reduces implementation time for complex publishing workflows. For organizations requiring professional support, Posit offers consulting services specifically for Quarto implementations—a level of commercial backing that FastPages never had. This combination of active community support and professional services makes Quarto a more sustainable long-term choice for serious content creators and organizations investing in technical publishing infrastructure.
Choosing the Right Platform for Your Needs
The transition from FastPages opens opportunities to evaluate not just direct replacements but comprehensive solutions that address modern content creation needs. For users focused primarily on technical blogging and scientific publishing, Quarto represents the clear successor with enhanced capabilities and long-term viability. However, content creators who also need lead generation, audience engagement, and mobile-first experiences should consider supplementing Quarto with specialized platforms like Perspective. The key lies in understanding that modern content marketing requires multiple tools working in harmony rather than expecting a single platform to handle every requirement.
FastPages users who primarily created static content will find Quarto’s enhanced publishing capabilities more than adequate for their needs. Those who struggled with FastPages’ limitations around styling, multiple output formats, or collaborative workflows will appreciate Quarto’s comprehensive feature set. However, users whose goals extend beyond content publishing to include lead generation, interactive marketing funnels, or mobile-first user engagement may benefit from a hybrid approach that combines Quarto for content creation with platforms like Perspective for audience development. This strategic combination addresses both the technical publishing needs that drove users to FastPages originally and the broader marketing requirements that have emerged in today’s competitive digital landscape.
The decision ultimately depends on balancing immediate migration needs with long-term content strategy goals. Quarto provides the most direct path for preserving existing FastPages workflows while gaining significant new capabilities. Platforms like Perspective offer complementary functionality for users whose content strategy includes lead generation and mobile engagement. Smart content creators will evaluate both options, potentially implementing Quarto for their main publishing needs while exploring Perspective for marketing and audience development initiatives.
For creators, agencies, and mobile-focused marketers, Perspective emerges as a smart choice that addresses the mobile-first reality of modern content consumption. Its speed, personalization capabilities, and performance optimization make it particularly valuable for users who need to balance content quality with conversion optimization in an increasingly mobile-driven environment.
