Blogdown

I have been a happy user of R markdown and bookdown developed by Yixui Xie. When I decided to start this blog, giving blogdown a try was a no-brainer. To be honest, it was not my first choice. Jekyll was #1 given it’s good support by GitHub pages. Then I took a dive with Pelican. Both are impressive, but both brought equally painful theming: the base theme sort of works, and only sort of, but anyway was not what I wanted. Attempts to use anything else failed. I didn’t have time to dig into the HTML/CSS templates.

Blogdown just worked out of the box without any sort of caveat.

Setup

Basically, I just followed up the blogdown documentation. As for all his projects, Yixui’s documentation is clear, didactic and shows how much thoughts have gone into making his software easy to use, yet powerful.

By defaults, blogdown uses the Hugo, but a Jekyll backend is in beta.

Great resources are R Blogdown Setup in GitHub, even its valuable update R Blogdown Setup in GitHub (2).

Themes

As in other solutions, theming is never straightforward. Blogdown uses Hugo themes which cannot always be imported without changes and would need a bit of massaging. Having said that, if you find a them you like, it is just a matter of running blogdown::install_theme("REPONAME"), and the theme will be downloaded and installed in the themes subdirectory. blogdown will automatically change the theme: parameter in the toml configuration file and the site will be re-generated. Easy enough? Bonus points for Hugo that takes under 100ms to do that job.