A week of blogdown for RStudio's summer 2019 interns.

Day 04

The finishing touches

Alison Hill / 2019-06-13

Slides here

Choose your own adventure(s)!

Our week together is over, but here are ideas for putting the final finishing touches on your blogdown site:

  1. Set up custom archetypes for yourself! These are templates that your Hugo theme uses to pre-format new content. I wrote a blog post to get you started.

  2. Add your blog’s feed to RWeekly.org. In the academic theme, the full RSS is enabled by default. Don’t be confused because other themes don’t do this. All major RSS readers should automatically recognise the available feeds when you point the reader to your URLs. Check it out yourself! Note this text at the top:

    {{/* Generate RSS with full page content rather than just summary. */}}
...

    You can see the feeds are enabled in your site’s config.toml file in this section:

    [outputs]
  home = [ "HTML", "RSS", "JSON" ]
  section = [ "HTML", "RSS" ]

    To submit a feed for any given content section, use the following link format:

    All content: https://alison.rbind.io/index.xml
Post feed: https://alison.rbind.io/post/index.xml
Publication feed: https://alison.rbind.io/publication/index.xml
etc.

  3. Enable blogdown to build other kinds of R Markdown output formats from your static/ directory, for example, like xaringan slides, a flexdashboard, a pagedown CV/resume- any other single .Rmd file that you’d like to render within your site. Read up on this in the book, and reference the demo site for step-by-step instructions.

  4. Once your site is “live”, you’ll want to work incognito 🔐. Try drafting content in GitHub branches as described in this blog post. You already have the wiring setup in your netlify.toml to enable branch deploys, so try it out! Make a branch, commit/push, and go to your Netlify deploy logs to see the link.

Deeper Dives

Here are some great Hugo learning materials I highly recommend for learning more: