Build Your Own Website or Blog Using R, RStudio and R Packages.
Introduction
R enthusiasts are focused on developing packages and websites to promote their profile and share their knowledge to the world. Recently released packages such as hugo, blogdown, Rmarkdown, bookdown has played a significant amount of role in this popularity for R statistical software among general users and academics in every field of statistics.
Due to this reason, I also wanted to develop my own R package to solve problem in hand and share it with the #rstats community. Even though Social Media is a strong way of sharing this amount of information, it is not sturdy over time. To resolve this only I chose to develop my own website using R and supportive tools from R. You are reading this post on my website which I developed in a very short period of time and have being maintaining regularly by posting articles.
Materials
I could have written an extensive and long article describing how I developed this website with screenshots and explanatory steps. As it should be a valuable experience I am only going to give you the materials which were used with important points with facts. Further, I shall give you certain specifics of my own website.
“Making Websites with Rmarkdown and Blogdown by Yihui Xie.”
- Presentation of 20 slides.
- Most of the basic information for packages which are necessary for website development.
- Brief introduction about the website structure and process.
“Up and Running with Blogdown by Alison Presmanes Hill.”
- Brief information for blogdown and other development materials.
- Described information Deployment and maintaining the website with other tools related to R and Rstudio.
“Rmarkdown Websites.”
- Briefest description about using Rmarkdown/Rmd files for website development.
- There are few other links which could be considered useful.
“How to make an RMarkdown Website by Nick Strayer & Lucy D’Agostino McGowan.”
- One example sample website developed and explained briefly by the authors.
- Several links to spark curiosity about website development using Rmarkdown.
“Creating websites in R by Emily C Zabor.”
- Explanation on different type of websites which can be produced by R.
- Deployment and additional requirements for website development.
“Getting Started with Blogdown by David Selby.”
- Limited amount of information regarding website development.
- This was written for a talk for the “Warwick R User Group Talk” in 2017.
“Blogdown by Peter’s Blog.”
- 4 Tutorials explaining from scratch about how to develop your website using blogdown.
- Tutorial 1 explains about website themes and setting up R and Rstudio.
- Tutorial 2 is about hosting the website locally or sharing the work with others.
- Tutorial 3 will be information about getting the site live.
- Tutorial 4 describes how to bring the website online through Netlify or GitHub.
“Academic by George Cushen”
- All the information about the academic theme this is very popular among people in rstats community.
- Descriptive amount of information about changing elements in the academic theme to make it more homely fo the user.
“Happy Git and GitHub for the User.”
- Git and GitHub with R with all the information that anyone needs to know.
“RMarkdown : The Definitive Guide by Yihui Xie, J. J. Allaire, Garrett Grolemund.”
- Book with all the information related to Rmarkdown files.
- No need to look anywhere for clarification regarding Rmarkdown.
“blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, Alison Presmanes Hill.”
- Similar to the previous two books this is also the most useful for blogdown.
- No need to look anywhere else for further understanding regarding blogdown.
My Personal Website / Blog
Information related to my website / blog will be discussed here. Mostly encouraging other people to make necessary changes in the original template to satisfy their curiosity and interest.
- I also used the academic theme but made alot of changes.
- These changes include with a new css, color changing, font changing and others.
- In the Home page I explored adding icons, heading names and changing the header successfully.
- While writing blog posts I was able to learn inventive ways to make them interesting.
For now that is all I have done in related to developing my own website. It should be your own choice what you are going to develop, a website / blog. Mine is a website where articles are regularly posted. Further, it should be noted that the above materials were active when I was writing this post, therefore if it is not active do use google and try to find it.
THANK YOU