2 min read

Trying out BlogDown

2017/09/29

I'm trying out blogdown (https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/) for serving up the project notebook. Advantages:

  • Rebuilds only update changed files
  • Dialog box for creating new posts
  • Automatically shows posts in date order, presumably even if they've been edited
  • Might be possible to automate serving it up on the github page, so Jenn can just look at it in a web browser

(Potential) Disadvantages:

  • Whole new file structure to figure out (in particular, I may have to modify the knitr option for setting the working directory, which was based on a relative path)
  • Presumably I can set up the post creation script to include my ProjectTemplate preamble, but that will take work/trial and error
  • I will have to figure out how caching works with this.
  • Out of the box, doesn't seem to have any way to do universal search (like bookdown has) or easy way to complile all the pages to pdf
  • The default theme doesn't inlude any links to allow filtering by categories from within the website (however, there is a find_tags() and similar functions within the package)
  • The index file is rebuilt every time, which might get slow as the number of posts gets large (unless there's a way to have static archives)

Installation

After installing the blogdown package from CRAN, I:

  • Installed Hugo using blogdown::install_hugo()
  • Created a new site using blogdown::new_site()
  • Deleted the preexisting posts (after looking at them) from the content/ subdirectory
  • In config.toml:
    • Changed the title (although this doesn't appear anywhere in the server window)
    • Switched the GitHub link to the InvasionHet page
    • Got rid of the Twitter link
    • Stole a runway picture from one of Jenn's talks, putting it in public/images/Runway.png, and set it as the icon
  • In my first file with the ProjectTemplate header, I found that the root.dir has to be set to ../../.. (knitr is running from within the content/posts/ directory)

Issues

  • There is a mismatch between line length used by knitr to output data and the page width in the html file (which is actually rather narrow, given the font size). I think the solution is to make the html with larger, somehow.