blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown. blogdown is an R package that allows you to create websites from R markdown files using Hugo, an open-source static site generator written in Go and known for being incredibly fast.. You can read more about the differences between WordPress and Hugo (and other static site generators) here, here, and here. If you did this correctly the files will now be uploaded to your GitHub repo. This post is intended to summarize some aspects of Blogdown, Hugo, and getting it all set up with GitHub Pages as I figured it out, as well as highlight some things I learned. Both the colour theme and font set can be customized. A few troubleshooting strategies to save your sanity. Go into the project directory and run the command to make the project directory as a git repository. To get started you need three things: a blogdown website; hosted on GitHub and; published via Netlify. The other parts are: Part I about to setup the blog using Hugo, RStudio and blogdown Part II explains my workflow of creating new posts. The config.toml of the hugo-tranquilpeak-theme I use contains, among other things, ... Now, you just change the name of the new coverImage to berlin_blur.png and the result is more appealing and easier to read, I hope :) Getting Started with Blogdown I have been told by a countless number of people that creating a personal website is a great way to showcase your skills and tell your story. Once the blog is created, people might want to submit their blogs’ RSS feeds to R-bloggers.But before that can happen, one must modify the RSS template to meet the requirements of RSS submission.. Due to my successful experience in creating a new Jekyll RSS … Blogdown is a great resource to utilize. The “Menu” section changes the colors in the top menu bar. Want to build a website right in RStudio? I am creating my first attempt at a blogdown website using the hugo-academic theme. Blogdown Website with Hugo-Theme-Learn > Host site on GitHub Host site on GitHub. Typically, there are two way to customise your theme: 1 - Change config.toml parameters. Setting up your blog with RStudio and blogdown III: modify your theme. I would also like to point out that this is a very basic introduction to creating a blog/website with blogdown. Look if the author provides releases from time to time. Please read Section \@ref(dep-path) to know the technical reasons if you prefer. The default values of these options work best with blogdown. Highlight all the files you want to commit and make sure they are set to staged. To create your own theme and request it to be added to this section, follow these steps: Follow the guide to create a new theme; Upload your theme file to a new Github repository; Reach out to us with the repository link in the Contributing channel in the community Discord; Custom theme. If you have an comments, constructive critism, questions, etc. Once we have ready our theme, we can add some content, modifying or deleting the various examples we will find in /content/post. I am doing this from within RStudio and was editing the example hugo-academic website and using the 'serve site' addin. One of the biggest hurdles I had was creating my site with the Hugo Academic Theme. Add a commit message and then press commit. I am not going to go over this because I am still learning how to do this myself. Look into the documentation to se… If you are working on an R Markdown post, but do not want blogdown to compile it, you can temporarily change its filename extension from .Rmd to another unknown extension such as .Rmkd. Like I mentioned in the beginning, this is a very basic introduction into blogdown. I have been contemplating this for some time but kept procrastinating. Netlify will then allow you to select from your existing GitHub repositories. To browse themes click here, Create site using the new_site() function. Go to Netlify’s website and click on the sign up button and sign up using your existing GitHub account. If you don’t know anything about git, I recommend reading. The author of the theme goes into great detail on how to get started and the different levels of customization you can do. blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown, Academic Theme Documentation (if your going to use the academic theme), Making a Website Using Blogdown, Hugo, and GitHub pages. A Hugo theme on Github (a character string of the form user/repo, and you can optionally specify a GIT branch or tag name after @, i.e. #change directories into your public folder - this is where the site builds to when you run blogdown::hugo_build() cd ~/Desktop/blogdown_site/public #add the new file git add . For instance, to change the entries in your Main Menu, you can use the Categories that you assign to each article. remotes::install_github('rstudio/blogdown'), Pick the theme you want to use. Themes. library(blogdown) install_hugo() new_site() Blogdown will generate the necessary file structure within your directory and populate some example files as well as CSS files for the theme. Additionally: 1. This theme is suitable for those who prefer minimal styles, and want to … theme can be of the form user/repo@branch). If your site renders beautifully locally, and your drag-and-drop site from public/ looks the same, but you are missing key content when you actually deploy to Netlify using a Hugo build, you may have inadvertently stumbled into a Hugo date time warp. Once you review the above material you should have a pretty firm grasp on how to get the ball rolling. Now, you’ll have to know when the theme gets updated. Once you click create repository you should be on your repository page. All opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of any other agencies or groups. Look at the repo to decide if the author is responsive to reported issues or pull requests (PRsin developer speech). Boy was I wrong! Translated from her Chinese Weibo.↩︎ How? Site build with blogdown. Log in, and select: New site from Git-> Continuous Deployment: GitHub. Again, Blogdown is a new package for R and RStudio that helps you to create blog posts and other types of web content using the RMarkdown language. Customise the theme. To do this click the green “Clone or Download” button on the right hand side and copy the url displayed. There are numerous different themes to pick from. Up and Running with Blogdown. This blog post isn’t a sure fire way to do it but more of an overview of how I did it. This is important if you (like me) are still not comfortable with Git/Github and instead of forking and synchronizing repos are preferring to install updates via ZIP files. You could go hardcore git and make the theme a git submodule of your website repo. Keep in mind that this is restricted to the options that the theme … The “Primary” section changes the color of links and icons depending on whether you want a dark or light-colored theme. Using themes with blogdown: Lesson learned. I hope this post has helped you in some way in getting your website going. This was all going well until I tried to change the project information. But instead of writing new content, I had to struggle once again using the sophisticated machinery of Hugo and my academic-theme.With painful experiences, I learned that one has to be cautious with updates to prevent breaking changes. blogdown::new_site() Change the theme If you want to change the default theme, you can use your own theme or get a new one from https://themes.gohugo.io/. Hugo. Made with GitHub, the R blogdown package, and the Keep in mind that this is restricted to the options that the theme developer made available. I am creating my first attempt at a blogdown website using the hugo-academic theme. Arguments passed to bookdown::html_document2() (note the option theme is not supported and set to NULL internally, and when template = NULL, a default ... to change options in YAML. The time has finally come to start creating the site. We use analytics cookies to understand how you use our websites so we can make them better, e.g. There are a number of ways to deploy your new website but I personally like Netlify. Pick the repo you’ve been with. This file can be copied to your root directory (to replace the config.toml file from your original theme) or used as a template to correctly write a new config.toml file for your new theme.↩︎. Pick the theme you want to use and look at the line that says Minimum Hugo Verision: You can check what verision of hugo you have by using hugo_version() in R. Now lets get started! git clone https://github.com/zoleak/Personal_Website.git. Read up on blogdown/Hugo Lastly, click the push button. The main thing you should know is that you can edit the example site in any way you would like. The last thing I am going to touch base on is how to get your new site deployed to Netlify. In the themes/ directory, navigate to the file for your newly downloaded theme and find exampleSite/config.toml. Tell your website to use your custom theme and/or font by setting theme and font parameters in config/_default/params.toml. After a quick google search I came across the blogdown package. If all went well then you should see a folder with the files in your repo in the directory that you chose. Some of the others were a bit too minimal and I didn’t want to search for a Hugo theme and then find out it doesn’t play nice with Latex and R. So I went with the default theme (Hugo Lithium). If you decide to use the Academic Theme look over the documentation . DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN THIS FOLDER EVER! The config.toml and files in the config folder take the theme information from this themes folder. Of all the themes recommended in the blogdown book, I liked the default theme the best. For a personal blog I personally prefer distill because I can get busy, neglect my blog for a year, come back to write a … ⛔ 💥 Okay, we can now create the example website using another function from the blogdown package. Wait a couple seconds and let it do it’s thing. Blogdown, GitHub, and Netlify, oh my! The fact that it is based on bookdown means most bookdown features are supported, such as Fonts: Create your custom font by following the steps at the webpage https://sourcethemes.com/academic/docs/customization/#custom-theme. Your theme will give your blog some flavour and will help to organise it … Now you have to create a local copy of your repository or in other words “clone it”. There are a couple different options to create the site but I believe the best one is using the new_site() function. #commit the changes git commit -a -m "adding Caitlin's new blog post" #push the changes to the Github server git push please let me know and contact me. Save it under data/fonts/ (avoid using spaces in filenames). So in order to “clone” the repo with the url that you just copied, you’re going to have to use git. Run install.packages("blogdown") in R if you haven't yet. You can also specify a full URL to the zip file or tarball of the theme. This was all going well until I tried to change the project information. Changing the blogdown theme cover image ... Theme: Hugo Tranquilpeak. Before you jump right in I recommend reading some online material and watching some youtube videos. Configure the directory name and path, and the hugo theme is gcushen/hugo-academic. Here is a list of the resources that helped me a lot. Lastly, I am always amazed at the power of both blogdown and the more recent hugodown, but you are still relying on a changing version of Hugo and your theme over time. After almost one year of interruption, I started re-using blogdown again. Now I’m not saying that this stuff is extremely easy but if someone like myself(absolutely no website development knowledge) can do it, YOU CAN TOO! Not sure if this is still a thing but if you have the same problem definitly check out that post! Look if the author is currently active. 3. If his/her repo was not updated for several months or later I would not choose this theme. I used the academic theme so I will use this one for the example. Blogdown. The amount of things you can do with this package is almost endless.. especially if you have an understanding of CSS, HTML, and Javascript. By default, this will download the most updated theme version for you 1. The “Backgrounds” section changes the color of the section panels on the first page. 2. When you are ready to deploy, commit your changes and push to GitHub, then go online to. Part III (this one) how to modify the theme. Blogdown makes it easy to create Hugo blogs or personal websites, and it is becoming more and more popular in the R community. The two biggest excuses I kept telling myself was that it would be too difficult & it would cost money. It was originally written by Jonathan Rutheiser, and I have made several changes to it. Blogdown makes it easy to create Hugo blogs or personal websites, and it is becoming more and more popular in the R community. blogdown::install_hugo() # install hugo (helper function you can install separately) You can launch your first website If you run the below code, you will get your first website. they're used to gather information about the pages you visit and how many clicks you need to accomplish a task. Analytics cookies. You can do this by going to the hugo website. 4. You should see all your files there. You can do this like so: blogdown::new_site(theme = "gcushen/hugo-academic"). There is so much more you can do to your website to make it awesome! The last piece of advice I will give before we get started is to make sure you check what the minimum hugo verision is for the theme you want to use. Use the top menu buttons in Rstudio to browse to the directory on your computer where your GitHub repo is. There was a breaking change in the hugo-academic theme, so I had to download the development version of blogdown. Whatever theme you choose, you’ll need to pick one of 3 ways to make your new site: If you are happy with the default theme, which is the lithium theme, you can use: blogdown::new_site() # default theme is lithium If you want a theme other than the default, you can specify the theme at the same time as you call the new_site function: ... We need to change the default publish directory from public/ to docs/. In RStudio, click Project -> New Project -> New Directory -> Website using blogdown. Typically, there are two way to customise your theme: 1 — Change config.toml parameters. It wasn’t until I started using R this past year that I realized how wrong I was. We need to make use of Blogdown & Hugo to compile our .Rmd file and create our html post: blogdown::build_site() blogdown::serve_site() Other themes Blogdown relies on Hugo, a static page generator that can compile markdown files with templates into full webpages. If you want to change anything in the hugo-academic theme (or in any other theme), you should, Tell your website to use your custom theme and/or font by setting theme and font parameters in. As the blogdown book mentions, also look at the theme’s popularity and activity before adopting it. The best part about Netlify is that it’s free and extremely easy. Once you review the above material you should have a pretty firm grasp on how to get the ball rolling. Once it’s done hit close. https://sourcethemes.com/academic/themes/, https://sourcethemes.com/academic/docs/customization/#custom-theme, https://cdnjs.com/libraries/highlight.js/, The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), https://sourcethemes.com/academic/zh/docs/page-builder/#icons, Creating a path: This is VERY, VERY important. Using another function from the blogdown theme cover image... theme: 1 - config.toml. Setting theme and font parameters in config/_default/params.toml customise your theme: 1 - change parameters... In any way you can also specify a full URL to the theme! Themes/ directory, navigate to the file for your newly downloaded theme and find exampleSite/config.toml originally written by Jonathan,... New directory - > website using blogdown custom theme and/or font by setting theme and font parameters in.. Anything about git, I recommend reading some online material and watching some youtube videos of! 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Data/Fonts/ ( avoid using spaces in filenames ) you in some way getting. Before you jump right in I recommend reading some online material and some... Technical reasons if you don ’ t until I tried to change the project and! Netlify will then allow you to select from your existing GitHub repositories well! Issues or pull requests ( PRsin developer speech ) you review the above material should! Sure they are set to staged is an amazing package in which you see. Is that you can create blogs and websites with R Markdown to the directory name and path, deploy. Anything about git, I recommend reading some online material and watching youtube! Website repo was that it ’ s website and using the new_site ( ) function and. Amazing package in which you can do fonts: create your own website/blog there are a couple options...