blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown

The R Series

by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas, Alison Presmanes Hill

Creating Websites with R Markdown provides a practical guide for creating websites using the blogdown package in R. In this book, we show you how to use dynamic R Markdown documents to build static websites featuring R code (or other programming languages) with automatically rendered output such as graphics, tables, analysis results, and HTML widgets. The blogdown package is also suitable for technical writing with elements such as citations, footnotes, and LaTeX math. This makes blogdown an ideal platform for any website designed to communicate information about data science, data analysis, data visualization, or R programming. Note that blogdown is not just for blogging or sites about R; it can also be used to create general-purpose websites. By default, blogdown uses Hugo, a popular open-source static website generator, which provides a fast and flexible way to build your site content to be shared online. Other website generators like Jekyll and Hexo are also supported. In this book, you will learn how

144 pages, Hardcover

Published December 13, 2017

Reviews

[Yuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book showcased the power of blogdown. You can easily create a website in 10 minutes using Netlify, Hugo,blogdown, rmarkdown.

Yihui Xie provided a step-by-step guide for the hugo-xmin theme. Upon finishing the book, you will have a much better understanding of how Hugo works, the standard structure (layouts, static, contents, public, config.toml), rules of overriding(layout/partials, layout/_default,static/css/custom.css), tips to add functionalities to your website (e.g., add math, add highlight.js, change layouts, add custom.css), etc.

However, you still need to be cautious when deploying your own site using the xmin-theme, as Hugo has upgraded a few times to version 0.60.1 (as today). The hugo-xmin was build under a very old version of Hugo.

[Azure · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reference book if you're familiar with R and need to create a website. By following this guide, I was able to revamp my personal website and blog pretty quickly, and I'm really happy with the results.

(Only giving this 4* because some parts of the online text are out of date due to updates with Hugo. However, the author is working on updating those parts currently, so that may be a moot point in the future.)