Why a personal website?

• Be professional 👔

  • Some advice on managing your online presence - Hadley Wickham

• Autobiography 📖

  • I web, therefore I am. - Yihui Xie

• Learning and Sharing 🔈

  • The unreasonable effectiveness of public work - David Robinson

  • Becoming an R blogger - Rebecca Barter

• Have fun programming and blogging! 😁

  • Twitter Threads vs Blogging - Yihui Xie

How to get it done?

1. customize your content by modifying a template website -- lots of work 😅

   • install.packages("blogdown")

   • blogdown::install_hugo()

2. custom domain name -- straightforward 😄

   • Google Domains (.com, .org, .me) for a cost of $12 per year

   • Google Analytics (monitor website traffic for free)

3. publish with GitHub and Netlify -- somewhat tricky 😣

   • tell Netlify to continuously build and deploy your website from source

   • configure custom domain DNS

RStudio and Website using blogdown

New Project $\to$ New Directory $\to$ Website using blogdown

RStudio and Website using blogdown

New Project $\to$ New Directory $\to$ Website using blogdown

File structure (VERY IMPORTANT!!!)

• configuration: a few site settings to go through

  • config.toml

  • config/_default/*.toml $\Rightarrow$ languages, menus, params

• content: mostly markdown files

  • home/*.md -- homepage widgets

  • authors/admin -- your biography

  • post, talk, project, publication -- your achievements 💯

• static: self imported files

  • images, slides, resume, etc.

• DO NOT TOUCH: public, resources, themes

Homepage Widgets (content/home)

Homepage Widgets (content/home)

• active = true: keep widget; active = false: discard widget

• weight

  • display order (small weight shows first)

  • works in the same way for both homepage widgets and navigation bar menus

For example, content/home/accomplishments.md

+++
# Accomplishments widget.
widget = "accomplishments"  
headless = true  # This file represents a page section.
active = false  # Activate this widget? true/false
weight = 50  # Order that this section will appear.

Biography (content/authors/admin)

• folder name admin can be replaced with a customized user name

• edit authors/admin/_index.md to introduce yourself

• replace authors/admin/avatar.jpg with your profile picture

Biography (content/authors/admin/_index.md)

Resources - icons

• "<i class="fab fa-r-project"></i>" versus "r icon::fa('r-project')"

• Fontawesome

Create a new R Markdown post (content/post)

• use the New Post Addin (or run blogdown::new_post(ext = '.Rmd'))

Create a new R Markdown post (content/post)

Do not knit your post, instead

• use the Serve Site Addin to preview your post, or

• refresh preview

In YAML header,

• draft:TRUE $\Rightarrow$ preview an R markdown post

• draft:FALSE $\Rightarrow$ ready to deploy a post

Resources - Highlight (config/_default/params.toml)

• Styles

highlight = true
highlight_languages = ["r"]  
highlight_style = "arta"

Resources - Emoji 😎

• ":sunglasses:" versus "r emo::ji('sunglasses')"

• Cheat sheet

Resources - Shortcodes

• Hugo's Build-in Shortcodes

• {{< youtube CjTLN-FXiFA >}}

Import files (static)

For image not created from your R Markdown file, you should

• add image to the static/img folder

• insert your image using ![alternate-text](img/xx.png)

Any files in the static folder can be referred using similar relative path!

Follow the following steps to link your resume to the navigation bar:

1. add your resume to the static/files folder

2. Specify the URL to your resume in config/_default/menus.toml

 [[main]]
    name = "Resume" # displayed text
    url = "files/resume.pdf"
    weight = 70

About hyperlink

• relative path will be after your domain name (e.g., https://xxx.com/),

  • homepage section (widget): [text](#posts)

  • tags: [text](tags/rstats)

  • categories [text](categories/r)

• DO NOT leave out prefix https:// when directing visitor to external webpages.

• Recommended practice for generating permanent links in config.toml

  • slug serves as a short page ID

  • URL won't change as you move around or rename file/folder

# Rules to generate permanent links of your pages
[permalinks]
    post = "/:year/:month/:day/:slug/"
    publication = "/publication/:slug/"
    talk = "/talk/:slug/"

Create a new publication (content/publication)

Create a new publication (content/publication)

Per publication folder, you need

• a Markdown file index.md
• an optional featured image featured.png
• an optinal citation cite.bib

Additional Site configurations

• config/_default/params.toml

  • your contact information (if you activate content/home/contact.md)

  • site name and description $\to$ title and description

  • custom domain and Google analytics $\to$ baseurl and google_analytics

  • active comments $\to$ comments

• config.toml

  • enable emoji $\to$ enableEmoji = true

  • activate Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages $\to$ hasCJKLanguage = true

Deploy with Netlify and GitHub

• Push your repository to GitHub

  • can be private and ignore the public folder

Public GitHub Repositories of Blogdown Website

• Yihui Xie

• Alison Hill

• Amber Thomas

• Annie Lyu