I’m Maëlle, I like R, blogging and science.

Why blog?

• Notes for future you

• Passion for sharing?

• Opportunities

Teaching this course is an opportunity I got from blogging but blogging is not a pyramid scheme 😉

Why create blog?

What if I don’t really want to blog regularly?

• Have a platform to share stuff when you need to.
• Portfolio. In particular, imagine someone recommending you for a thing.

What is a website?

• static: HTML, CSS, JS

• non static: more machinery on the server side

Online server somewhere.

Why Rmd for blogging?

• Data analysis with R
• Blogging about R
• R as an utility tool e.g. to generate text from structured data
• knitr supports other languages…

WHAT is a scientific Rmd blog?

IMHO 😸

I’ll list criteria so we have something to compare our adventures to.

Tech part

• Easy way to update from Rmd without too much copy-pasting
• Fits into your existing workflow or uses things you want to learn and invest time in
• Code, syntax highlighting
• Modern tooling (html5? mobile friendly?)

Science part

• References from a .bib file
• Easy way to cite posts?
• Equations
• Content. Blog about science, or stuff relevant to science&co (e.g. comparisons of way to fit and present linear models in R).

Human part

• Accessible. Alt text, contrast. Don’t add gate-keeping to science.
• You OWN it. Content, URL (no commercial service, no employer).
• Allows for interactions (social media? commenting?)
• Costs a few dollars a month at most.

Let’s go

• distill
• Hugo&hugodown
• WordPress
• Reproducibility
• Promotion
• Debrief

We’ll start with a tour of the course website

https://tiny.cc/rmd-blog