Brendan Rocks
@rocksbrendan
Blogging with rmarkdown, knitr, and Jekyll
Head of Data Science @ Satmetrix
why bother?
1. because you're not as clever as you think
2. because your memory is horrible
3. exploit the kindness/boredom of experts
4. because hadley wickham told you to
If you want to give back, I think writing a blog is a great way. Many of the things that you struggle with will be common problems. Think about how to solve them well and describe your solution to others.
-- From Hadley’s Reddit AMA a few weeks ago
but isn't it difficult and/or boring?
previous options
-
Do your analysis and copy and paste the results over
- Use a mardown-based blog-aware SSG like Jekyll, Hyde, Pelican, Hexo etc.
- Use a GUI, like Wordpress, Ghost.io, etc.
-
Roll your own R based Static Site Generator!
- I've done this before... Don't do this!
-
Use an R package
- There's a few options, but none on CRAN or under active-development
thanks to yihui xie
you can blog in two commands!
(and some dodgy wrapper functions I wrote)
new_post()
- Creates an Rmarkdown file with the neecesary boilerplate, in a new subdirectory within the blog
- Opens the Rmarkdown file in the Rstudio editor
- Serves an interactive live-preview of the site in the Rstudio viewer window, which updates whenever you save changes
those two commands in full
blog_push()
- Rebuilds the site locally, then uploads any changes an Amazon S3 bucket (which points to this domain name). The blog post is now live on the internet!
- This is just an R wrapper around the awscli commandline interface.
what is this black magic?
how jekyll works
how knitr-jekyll works
putting things on the internet
alias push_blog='aws s3 sync /home/br/projects/brendanrocks.com/_site \ s3://brendanrocks.com --exclude "cache/*|README.md" --delete'
Is easy withe the awscli
live demo!!
do it yourself!
1. Install R dependencies
install.packages(c("knitr", "servr", "devtools")) devtools::install_github("hadley/lubridate") devtools::install_github("brendan-r/brocks")
2. Install Ruby & Jekyll
3. Clone or download Yihui’s knitr-jekyll repo
4. Open up knitr-jekyll/knitr-jekyll.Rproj, and get blogging!
library(brocks) new_post("My first blog post!")
thank you!
For details
see the accompanying blog postS!
questions?
