Building this site: Quarto, GitHub Pages, and a win-probability worm

meta
R
cricket
Why I picked a plain-text, version-controlled site over a CMS — and how the cricket forecaster on the home page connects to a real model.
Author

Ruwan C. Karunanayaka

Published

June 13, 2026

I wanted a single place to publish my work: my consulting practice, the interactive tools I build, and writeups of the research behind them. A few constraints made the choice easy.

Everything I do already lives in R and LaTeX. I’m deepening Git this sabbatical, so a plain-text site under version control is a feature, not a chore. And I didn’t want a monthly bill for a CMS I’d have to wrestle. Quarto on GitHub Pages ticks all three: posts are .qmd files, the whole site is a git repository I own, and hosting is free.

The worm

The graphic on the projects page is a win-probability worm — the line that swings across the 50% mark as a chase unfolds. On the site it’s a lightweight SVG widget: between matches it replays recent internationals from precomputed model output, and during a live game it updates as the match unfolds.

What’s next

More tools are on the way — tennis and soccer forecasters are in final development — along with methodology posts on how to design studies and trust measurements.

More soon.