I’ve heard from so many people in the Data Science industry about the importance of creating your own online portfolio, i.e. a website where people can find key information about you, read about the projects you have been working on and finally where you can post blogs of this kind to share ideas and knowledge.
blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown
“A well-designed and maintained website can be extremely helpful for other people to get to know you, and you do not need to wait for suitable chances at conferences or other occasions to introduce yourself in person to other people. On the other hand, a website is also highly useful for yourself to keep track of what you have done and thought. Sometimes you may go back to a certain old post of yours to relearn the tricks or methods you once mastered in the past but have forgotten.” Yihui Xieblogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown
In this workshop you will learn how to create static websites using the blogdown package in R that allows you to create websites from R Markdown files using HUGO, an open-source static site generator written in Go.
If you are familiar with RMarkdown you should be able to use it without problems. One of the key things is to choose a suitable HUGO theme that will suit your needs.
Efficient Workflow
Before we start learning about blogdown, let us make sure we set up the connection between your RStudio and GitHub as it will make it easier for automated deployments of your websites. It will allow for an easy and efficient workflow for writing new posts for your blogdown website that will be possible to host on GitHub and serve through Netlify.
If you’ve never used Git or GitHub before, start by installing Git and creating a GitHub account. For more info on how to do it you can visit RToolbox: Git & GitHub that will guide you through the setup.
Connect RStudio to GitHub
The first thing you need to do is to set up Git on RStudio and Associate with your GitHub: In RStudio select Tools | Global Options… and select Git/SVN. You should make sure that the path to Git executable is showing correctly (this should already be set up for you by default).
If RSA key is not already showing click on the Create RSA Key… button. After you have created RSA key click on View public key, and copy the displayed public key.
Next, go to your GitHub Settings and select SSH and GPG keys tab
Click on the New SSH key button and name and passed your public key you have created and copied from RStudio.
Now, you are ready to start creating your website as a new project in RStudio. 😃
You might find it useful bookmarking the link for GitHub Cheat Sheet!
Building a website step by step
We’ll adopt a simple is beautiful approach and start building a website using a default theme.
👉 Go to the following GitHub repo to download the material: https://github.com/TanjaKec/eRum2020
From here on we will follow the steps given in the Xaringan presentation available from 👉 here
Xaringan presentation