How Do I Create a Blog? (The Meta First Post)

📘 Welcome to my blog — a space where I’ll be exploring ideas about teaching, physics, coding, and AI.

Fittingly, my first post is about the blog itself. Why? Because the act of creating it turned out to be an interesting project in its own right. It started with a simple question:

How do I create a blog that lets me write about code and science, and format things like equations and code blocks easily?

I wanted more than just another Medium clone. I needed a platform where I could:

Write in Markdown
Render LaTeX-style math
Share cleanly formatted code
Work locally with Git and VS Code
Keep full control over the site and its content

So I asked ChatGPT.

After some back and forth, the best setup for my needs turned out to be:

GitHub Pages for hosting
VS Code for writing and editing
Quarto as the engine for generating the site

I’m already using GitHub Copilot through my education account, and since I’m also teaching a course on vibe-coding the whole project felt on-theme. (More on vibe-coding soon.)

🔧 How I Set Up This Blog

Here’s a quick rundown of the steps I followed to get everything working:

Install Quarto

I downloaded and installed Quarto. It’s an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that integrates beautifully with VS Code.

Create a new Quarto project

In the VS Code terminal, I used the Quarto extension to create a new website project:

quarto create-project myblog --type website

Create structure and posts

Now comes the beauty of using Copilot Pro Agent: I just asked the agent to create the files, folders, modify the index.qmd, add my pictures, etc. Isntead of looking for the commands in google or asking chatgpt in a different window, I ask Copilot Agent in plain english.

Preview the site locally I used:

quarto preview

This lets me see changes live in my browser as I edit.

Push to GitHub

I initialized a Git repo, committed everything, and pushed it to a new GitHub repository.

Enable GitHub Pages

In the GitHub repo settings, I enabled Pages and selected the main branch and /docs folder as the source.

Publish with Quarto

I rendered the site into the docs folder using:

quarto render

Now the site is live at: 👉 https://vladimirlopez.github.io/the-thinking-experiment

That’s it for now. This blog will be a thinking space — a lab notebook, a course companion, and maybe a bit of a philosophical experiment. Thanks for reading the very first post.

Next up: What is vibe-coding, really?