This year I had the chance to speak at two R-Ladies meetups (I might have invited myself to those meetups to make the most of being in town, create your own happiness!), one in Cape Town in March, one in Seattle in May. It was a blast both times! I gave the same talk twice, and decided it was about time to write it up.

My talk in March was aimed at pairing, well tripleting, with Marie Dussault’s talk about setting up your blogdown website, and Stephanie Kovalchik’s talk about sports blogging so it is not about these topics. What it is is my non data-driven, quite personal view on blog content and promotion, which hopefully features some useful tips for any wannabe R blogger!

Sort of introduction to this post and hopefully the next ones

I usually don’t have any New Year resolution. However, recent tweets about productivity – from people I actually find productive and inspiring – made me ponder a bit on my unfinished side projects. My main 2016 side-project was submitting and defending my PhD thesis, and I’ve written a few R packages, so I’m overall quite happy.

But in 2016 I also started stuff without delivering. In particular, I prepared small data projects in Github repositories with a very precise README because I didn’t have a blog and planned to start one after my PhD thesis. Then I created my blog (thanks Nick!) and… only re-posted an analysis of mine from another blog. My nice repositories are still lying around and they represent quite a few of my West Side-project Story unfinished buildings. I’ve decided transforming some of my usable data projects into blog posts was a nice step towards being or at least feeling more productive.

Let’s start today with my visualizations of names of French places!