Maëlle's R blog

Last week I had the pleasure to lead an online course about “Scientific Blogging with R Markdown”, invited by Najko Jahn and Anne Hobert from SUB Göttingen. To follow the example set by the incredible Alison Hill, I’ll write a summary of what I’ve learnt and would like to do better next time. The topic The topic of the course was “Scientific Blogging with R Markdown”. For months I would sometimes write down some ideas, from “present distill” to “show web developer console”, that I had whilst reading things online.

I’ve recently found myself having to write a bit of CSS or JS for websites made with Hugo. Note for usual readers: it is a topic not directly related to R, but you might have played with either or both CSS and JS for your R blog or Shiny app. On a scale from Peter Griffin programming CSS window blinds to making art with CSS, I’m sadly much closer to the former; my JS knowledge is not better.

Fancy (re-)creating your website using Hugo, with or without blogdown? Feeling a bit anxious? This post is aimed at being the Hugo equivalent of “What to know before you adopt a pet”. We shall go through things that can/will break in the future, and what you can do to prevent future pain. I’m writing this post with R users in mind, which means I shall use R analogies and mentioning blogdown, but I hope some aspects are generalizable to other potential Hugo adopters.

Removing Disqus from my blogdown blog had been on my mind for a while, ever since I saw Bob Rudis’ tweet enjoining Noam Ross to not use it for his brand-new website. The same Twitter thread introduced me to Utterances, a “lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues”, which I have at last installed to my blog in lieu of Disqus. How did I manage to not lose anything of value? How easy was it to switch tools? Read on to learn more!

Last week, Axios published a very interesting piece reporting on Trump’s private schedule thanks to an insider’s leak. The headlines all were about Trump’s spending more than 60% of his time in “executive time” which admittedly was indeed the most important aspect of the story. I, however, also got curious about Axios’ work to go from the PDF schedules to the spreadsheet they made public. In this post, I’ll have a got at using rOpenSci’s Jeroen Ooms’ pdftools package and some data-wrangling stubborness of mine to try and rectangle Trump’s PDF schedules.