Maëlle's R blog

My kids got a cool electronic storyteller as a gift. It is basically a pretty cube that you shake to make it play tracks. La conteuse merveilleuse comes with pre-loaded songs and stories, but you can also add your own. Very handy, as we had e.g. CDs that came with magazines. According to the anti-manual1, to add a mp3 or wav file you own, you first need to convert it to the storyteller’s expected format by using the company’s online converter, la moulinette (the mill).

A big part of my work includes putting content about R online, in blog posts and online books. I’m therefore very interested in the technical infrastructure that allows us R users to produce beautiful products out of R Markdown or Markdown source files. In this post I shall summarize my recent experiments around making HTML and PDF versions of books. Thanks to Julie Blanc’s inspiring post in French, I have learnt this is called single-source publishing.

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.