Build Your Own Website or Blog Using R, RStudio and R Packages.

R
Website
Blog
Published

January 28, 2019

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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • Limited amount of information regarding website development.
  • This was written for a talk for the “Warwick R User Group Talk” in 2017.

“Getting Started with Blogdown by Danielle Navarro.”

Link

  • Extensive amount of information about website development using blogdown.
  • More than enough information about the insides of the website.
  • Detailed steps of writing posts and changing elements of the website.

“Blogdown by Peter’s Blog.”

Link

  • 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”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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.”

Link

  • 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