Blogging with R Markdown

👋 Welcome!

I’m Maëlle, I like R, blogging and science.

I am a proud R-Lady. 💜

@ma_salmon tells us ideas of content and how to promote your blog at the @RLadiesCapeTown meetup! Great tips!!! pic.twitter.com/SGXLaPx0Wl

— Marie Christine D💀 (@londonaesthetik) March 15, 2018

Why blog?

• Notes for future you

• Passion for sharing?

• Opportunities

👂If you have a technical blog, and it's brought you some positives (job-related, social, etc.), and you don't mind your tweet being screenshotted, I'd love to hear about them. And link to your blog, of course.

I'm giving a talk on it: https://t.co/LodrzlPRsF

— Vicki Boykis (@vboykis) October 5, 2020

Teaching this course is an opportunity I got from blogging but blogging is not a pyramid scheme 😉

Why create a blog?

What if I don’t really want to blog regularly?

• Have a platform to share stuff when you need to.
• Portfolio. In particular, imagine someone recommending you for a thing.

Why create websites

Personal website… But also

• course website

• event website

• etc.

Useful skill!

What is a website?

• static: HTML, CSS, JS

• non static: more machinery on the server side

Online server somewhere.

Why Rmd for blogging?

• Data analysis with R
• Blogging about R
• R as an utility tool e.g. to generate text from structured data
• knitr supports other languages…

WHAT is a Rmd blog?

IMHO 😸

I’ll list criteria so we have something to compare our adventures to.

Tech part

• Easy way to update from Rmd without too much copy-pasting
• Fits into your existing workflow or uses things you want to learn and invest time in
• Code, syntax highlighting
• Modern tooling (html5? mobile friendly?)

(Data) Science part

• References from a .bib file
• Easy way to cite posts?
• Equations
• Content. Blog about anything.

Human part

• Accessible. Alt text, contrast.
• You OWN it. Content, URL (if possible, no commercial service, no employer).
• Allows for interactions (social media? commenting?)
• Costs little to no money.

Let’s go

• distill
• Hugo&hugodown (&blogdown)
• Reproducibility
• Promotion
• Debrief

We’ll start with a tour of the course website

https://tiny.cc/rmd-blogging-jozi