Blogdown

Yihui Xie & Alison Presmanes Hill & Amber Thomas

Language: English

Publisher: Routledge

Published: Dec 12, 2017

Description:

blogdown: 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 to:

  • Build a website using the blogdown package;
  • Create blog posts and other website content as dynamic documents that can be easily edited and updated;
  • Customize Hugo templates to suit your site’s needs;
  • Publish your website online;
  • Migrate your existing websites to blogdown and Hugo.

Review

"The book blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown is an excellent read for beginners and advanced users alike. The target audience is R (R Core Team 2018) users of any level interested in creating a website. The book focuses on the R package blogdown (Xie 2018), explaining from beginning to end how to build and publish a website from the comfort of your R console. The name "blogdown" is a play on the word "Markdown," a markup language with plain text syntax, essentially a way to render HTML from an easy to read, plain text document . . . making it easy for statisticians and R practitioners to share their work directly from the comfort of their R console. I applaud the authors for this excellent contribution to the literature." ~ American Statistician

About the Author

Yihui Xie is a software engineer at RStudio. He has authored and co-authored several R packages, including knitr, rmarkdown, bookdown, blogdown, shiny, xaringan, and animation. He has published two other books, Dynamic Documents with R and knitr and bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown.

Amber Thomas is a data journalist and "maker" at the online publication of visual essays: The Pudding (https://pudding.cool). Her educational background was marine biology, but she has a strong love of data analysis, visualization, and storytelling.

Alison Presmanes Hill is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University, where she teaches Computer Science courses on data analysis, data science, and visualization. Her research focuses on using computational methods to study the development of children with neurodevelopmental disorders, in particular Autism Spectrum Disorders.