Static

A static website is a convenient platform for a blog. It serves fast, and it’s easy to maintain (if there are no bugs).

• Hugo makes it easy to generate pages.
• The blogdown R package makes it easy to author content in Markdown.
• If you maintain it on GitHub, you have an effective collaboration tool.
• Netlify hosting gets you automated deployment from a GitHub repo.

A beginning is a delicate time

Here’s how our team sets up to publish together.

Tools

I prefer to install tools in a virtual machine dedicated to a particular development environment. I use Ubuntu Linux in VirtualBox.

• Install R.
• Install RStudio.
• Install blogdown. In RStudio, install it from CRAN.

install.packages("blogdown")

• Install Hugo, which blogdown uses to generate pages. blogdown has a helper function to get that for you. In RStudio:

blogdown::install_hugo()

• Install Git.

Access content

• Create a GitHub account.
• Fork the hihk repo. HIHK is a stub website name. I used to write a blog I called “Heaven in Hell’s Kitchen.”
• Clone the repo to your local environment.

Write

• Create a Git branch. This supports development of multiple posts and releasing them selectively. My convention is to name the branch with the word “article” and a slug. The branch for this article is article_hugo.
• In RStudio, click Addins in the toolbar. Select New Post. If your post includes code chunks, you need to create R Markdown. If it’s text only, just Markdown.
• Write your post.

Publish

• Commit your changes in Git.
• Push to GitHub.
• Create a pull request into the master branch of the parent repo, pnojai/hihk. When I merge your pull request it, your post is deployed.
• After I merge your article’s development branch into master, you can delete your development branch.

View

This blog is live at a spare domain, www.steelwig.com. It has my picture and some stuff about me. The intention is to update that to reflect team contributions.

But wait, there’s more.

This online book details the architecture and process I outline here.

Creating Websites with R Markdown. Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, Alison Presmanes Hill.