A reference for the metadata fields used on pieces of writing here. Section headings are the literal frontmatter keys (except reading-time, which is computed and not stored in frontmatter).

Fields

date

When the piece was first created. Shown as “Created ” in the metadata header on each page. Clicking the date in any page’s metadata jumps to All pages sorted by creation date.

modified

When the piece was last meaningfully updated. Shown as “Updated ” if it differs from date by more than a day.

If you don’t set this in frontmatter, Quartz infers it from git history. Any commit touching the file updates the date — there is no “meaningful change” threshold. To freeze the value, set modified: explicitly in frontmatter.

reading-time

Auto-computed from the page text using the reading-time package, at roughly 265 words per minute. Shown as “N min read” in the metadata header. Not a frontmatter field; the only knob is the body text itself.

Clicking the value jumps to All pages sorted shortest first.

importance

A 1 to 10 manual score in the frontmatter field importance. Judgement of how important the piece is to the author, with 10 being the most important.

The parenthetical “(rank R of T)” alongside the score is the page’s standing among all rated pages — lower numbers mean the piece is more important, so rank 1 is the most important and rank T the least. Ties share a single rank (the floored median of their positions), so two equally-rated pieces in a corpus of three both show “rank 1 of 3”.

tags

The tags frontmatter field, a list of strings. Shown as “Tags: x, y, z” with each tag linking to its own page; the “Tags” label links to the full Tags index.

audio

Optional. The audio frontmatter field, either a string URL or an object of the form {src, label}. Renders a small speaker icon in the metadata; click to expand the full audio player with playback-speed and 15-second skip controls.