Blogdown - l'origine du site

Howdy y’all!

Today, as my first official post, I will talk about how I built this website. If I ever feel like going through another round of blogdown insanity, I will have this post to help me be efficient quickly, and also to compare if I find better ways to go about things !

I will focus first on getting the site up and running. I will talk about customisation and all that jazz another time.

Alison Hill’s blogpost “Up & running with blogdown in 2021” as well as her website repo were my reference, for getting started and for customising this site. I copied her fonts file because it was super pretty. The remainder of this post is based (or copied, really) on her words. I also periodically checked blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas and Alison Hill, for further details.

What you need

• R and RStudio,
• The blogdown package,
• GitHub,
• Netlify.

Setting up shop

1. Create a new public repo, with a README.md file, but no .gitignore;
2. Clone the repo locally¹, and create a new Rproject in the repo;
3. Do stuff with blogdown;
4. Commit and push the changes to GitHub;
5. Deploy the site on Netlify.
6. FIN.

Not really. Let’s go deeper into blogdown.

blogdown

I chose the Academic theme as my framework. You can check Wowchemy for other themes and Hugo too I believe. The Academic theme is simple and super nice to customise (says me AFTER building the dreaded thing. ANYWHO). Once my R project was good and ready to go, I followed Alison’s tutorial scrupulously. The following lines of code resume the essential commands to get started:

install.packages("blogdown")
blogdown::new_site(theme = "wowchemy/starter-academic")
blogdown::serve_site()
blogdown::new_post(title = "Hi Hugo",
                     ext = '.Rmarkdown',
                     subdir = "post")

blogdown::serve_site() launches a live preview of the site in the Viewer pane². No need to hit refresh, it does it on its own when you save and/or knit. blogdown::new_post creates…a new post.

After this command, I changed the default author (blogdown.author), default file extension type (blogdown.ext) and default new file subdirectory (blogdown.subdir) in the .Rprofile. Whenever you change your .Rprofile, do not forget to save then Ctrl+Shift+F10 restart the session!!

Have a look at config.yaml and config/_default/params.yaml for further identification changes purposes, such as the title or the theme of your website.

Write your post and Ctrl+Shift+K knit the Rmarkdown to get the Markdown file³. This is the type of file Hugo (or Netlify, I’m not sure) uses to build your content. Once you are happy with your changes, check the following stuff up⁴.

blogdown::check_config()
blogdown::check_gitignore()
blogdown::check_content()
blogdown::check_netlify()
blogdown::check_hugo()
# You get some [TODO] items. Do them.

You can also use the all-in-one command, blogdown::check_site(). Once everything is clear, you can go on with publication!

Publishing the site

1. Netlify;
2. Sign in with GitHub;
3. Choose the repo you want to deploy;
4. Change the subdomain name.

You are all set! All in all, I believe it took me a good hour to get the site ready. Netlify will take care of building and deploying all the changes pushed on GitHub. But surely, you do not want to keep the cluttered template and you want to customise it a bit? (me: yeah!) Well, I will cover this topic in another post. Watch this space!

BONUS: new commands and keyboard shortcuts I learned

• file.create() to create a file in the current working directory. If I want to create a file in a subfolder, I specify the path, until the name of the new file and its extension. The folders must already exist! If they don’t:
• dir.create() to create a folder. If I specify the path, I can create a new folder within another folder. It’s like Inception!
• rstudioapi::navigateToFile(path.to.file) mint.
• Ctrl+W to close one tab, Ctrl+Shift+W to close all tabs. I haven’t found the use for “close all except current” yet.