RStudio: Building a Blog with R

25/1/2022 2-minute read

These are my notes from RStudio’s “Building a Blog with R” tutorial, which was presented by Isabella Velasquez on January 25th, 2022. The recorded presentation will be posted to Youtube, and materials for this presentation can be found on their Github repository for this presentation here.

For more links on RStudio meet-up, check out the link here.

Isabella Velasquez

Intro Question

What is your favorite data science or technical blog?

Agenda

  • Why create a blog

  • Deciding on topics

  • Considerations

  • Tools for building a blog

Why create a blog

  • when you’ve given the same advice 3 times, write a blog post

  • share what you’ve learned

  • write your opinions

  • give updates and news

  • external blogs (for companies)

    • Rstudio has 4 different blogs

      • RStudio Blog

      • AI Blog (Distill)

      • tidyverse (Hugodown)

      • RViews (Blogdown)

  • internal blog (for companies)

    • share information more easily and effectively

    • improve collaboration

    • serving as a bulletin board for projects

Types of Posts

  • standard lists

  • how-t0 / tutorials

  • news posts

  • problem - and - solutions

  • FAQ

  • cheat sheets

  • checklists

  • infographics

  • presentations

  • debates

  • inspiration

  • interviews

Seperating posts

  • tutorials (learning oriented)

  • how-tos (task oriented)

  • explanation (understanding oriented)

  • reference (information oriented)

Building a Blog with R

  • Knowledge of R and R Markdown

  • Version control (Github)

Today’s Demos

  • R blogdown

  • Distill

Creating a New Blog

  • Rstudio needs to be set up and connected through github

  • Create a new github repository

  • file \(\rightarrow\) , and copy and paste library(blogdown) new_site(theme "hugo-apero/hugo-apero", format = "toml", sample = FALSE, empty_dirs = TRUE)

    • this is for hugo-apero

  • config.toml has areas to change colors and fonts

Netlify

  • import new project , connect to github

Distill

  • Check out distill blog here.

  • wont be connected to github

  • install distill

  • File \(\rightarrow\) New Project \(\rightarrow\) New Distill Blog

  • great for data science writing

    • hover over text for footnotes

  • distill::creat_post("New Post!")

  • click knit to see what new website would look like

  • default settings

  • publish to RConnect : distill::publish_website(account = "", server = "")

Overall Thoughts

While this was called “Building a blog”, there wasn’t a lot of blog building. Similar to other RStudio presentations it was very business and product information heavy.