Blogdown

My last post from 9 months ago said that blogdown wasn’t working properly. I’m not sure if that’s still true, but my version of R at home is rather old, so I just updated to 3.5.1.

This requires reinstalling libraries, which is probably a good idea as there are a number of helper libraries that need to be rebuilt even when they don’t have an update (and hence can’t get reinstalled automatically):

• knitr (and dependencies)
• rmarkdown (and dependencies)
• ProjectTemplate
• blogdown (and dependencies)
• packages needed by serve.site() (downloaded automatically - thanks, Hadley!)
• tidyverse
• fitdistrplus

OK, both serve_site and build_site seem to work just fine. But where is the .Rprofile file? There are two: one in content/post (the original one) and one in the project root (which I had added as a workaround). Let me take out the one in the project root and restart R to see if things still work…

Now it fails in the same way that it did before. It appears that the hyper-local .Rprofile is not read when rmarkdown processes the file. Putting the file back in the project root seems to do the trick.

Goals and plans

I reviewed the original proposal to SNF, and wrote down, perhaps more clearly than before, a list of project goals (see separate post).

I also think it would be worthwhile to start generating a manuscript, using the proposal as the basis for the Introduction—it is quite well written!

And I do think that starting a TRACE document is a good way for me to figure out where I am in the project.