Day 5 - Building a Website with R

Websites with R - two approaches

Why even have a website?

Full Disclosure: I didn’t have a website until this course…

But it’s generally assumed to be a good idea for an academic to have a website.

  • people will search for you and it’s much easier to tell your story how you want it
  • you can showcase whatever you want (create a blog, write tutorials, a think piece, pre-prints, …)
  • PURE and other university platforms are
    • limited temporally
    • limited in scope
    • difficult to navigate

Brainstorm session (~15 min)

  • Do you have a website? If so, what’s on it? What are your experiences?
  • What (what skills) would you want to put on your website?

Some examples

Quarto vs. Blogdown

As with reproducible documents, there’s two general ways to build a website with R:

  1. The Blogdown (.rmarkdown) approach

  2. The Quarto (.qmd) approach

Both work perfectly well, have good documentation / tutorials, and will be supported for the forseeable future.

For today’s purposes, I will focus on the Quarto approach, because this what I’ve done.

If after today you feel like you like the blogdown approach better, that’s fine!

Here’s a great tutorial by Dan Quintana

–> also see Dan’s built with blogdown website

Let’s get going with creating a Quarto website / blog

We’re following these two tutorials:

Getting started with websites: https://quarto.org/docs/websites/

Getting started with blogs: https://albert-rapp.de/posts/13_quarto_blog_writing_guide/13_quarto_blog_writing_guide.html

Resources

Quarto Styling tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRX8plZpQE&ab_channel=AlbertRapp

see my page for reference: https://simonkarg.github.io/

see source code of my page for reference: https://github.com/SimonKarg/SimonKarg.github.io