Alright. I haven’t write any blog posts for several weeks now, last post was on Octerber 24, 2017. Since then I’ve been busy with searching for postdocs and preparing another manuscript. Luckily I found a great lab to start my postdoc caree (I will update after I defend). Also, the manuscript was submited on the last day of Janunary 2018, figure crossed!
So after all that been done and before I “officially” start writing my dissertation. I want to change my mind to something totally different. One project that on my mind for sometime is to use blogdown to write my own blog. The more I used R, the more I liked it. It’s easy to get started, but need a lot of effort to be good at (I think all things are). But anyway, they idea that use RStudio, I used it almost everyday, to write blog and Github to do version control is really cool.
Here I described what I did for two days with a lot of unexpectedtrouble shooting. I mostly followed this awesome tutorial by Alison Hill.
Set up RStudio environment
First, I need to setup my RStudio environment for the blog. You don’t have to use RStdio, but since it’s highly recommended by Yihui and I really like RStudio, so I did this first.
I first tried on my Windows 7 desktop. It looks very easy from blogdown book, however it took me a whole day and still can’t fix. I think the HUGO was not installed corrected. Besides there are some issue with LiveReload. Sometimes only plain text in the View panel, sometimes nothing shows. Anyway, I then switched to RStudio server on pauper. I’m going to push the code on Gihub, so it doesn’t matter what environment I use for now. I can clone the repo and re-start.
On RStudio server, the only problem I had is the LiveReload just show plain text instead of the webpage. The solution is to add relativeurls = true in config.toml file. I found it on Github, solved by Yihui. After that, everything works smoothly so far!
Choose a theme
In blogdown book, they recommended several themes, but they all have something that doesn’t fit my taste. Not because they are bad, just I know very limited CSS and JavaScript, so don’t want to spend a lot of time on it. I searched the HUGO theme and found Even looks really good.
These are two features I like:
- mininal design. I don’t need a lot of fancy features, just keep it simple.
- category and tags. Since I used tags to organize Evernote, I found tag is very helpful at organizing. I know I won’t have many posts, but tags is still very handy.
Here is a screenshot.
I installed by new-site function.
blogdown::new_site(theme = "olOwOlo/hugo-theme-even", theme_example = TRUE)
After this command, you can preview the website by blogdown::server_site().
Workflow
The workflow I used is suggest by blogdown. RStudio –> Git –> Github –> Netlify. I found it’s easier and more intuitive than Github page.
Set up Github credentials
One thing that can make your life much easier is to set up the Cache credentials for HTTPS (please see the Happy Git and GitHub for the useR for more details, I follow their instructions). In this way, you don’t need to type your username and password everytime you push or pull to the Github (To be honest, I don’t exactly how it works, but easier than SSH keys).
- Make sure the directory is connected to the remote (Github).
git remote -v
Output is like this in my directory:
origin https://github.com/timedreamer/jhblog.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/timedreamer/jhblog.git (push)
- Make sure the Git version is above 1.7.10
git --version
# on pauper
# git version 2.9.4
- To turn on the credential helper.
I did this in pauper, so used Linux command.
git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=10000000'
In the orignial tutorial, it says:
to store your password for ten million seconds or around 16 weeks, enough for a semester.
- Push and entering username/password.
Now you can push it to Github. It will ask your username and password for once. After than you can just git push.
git push -u origin master # just enter username/password once.
git push # for next 16 weeks, just need git push.
Connect to Netlify.
This step is pretty straightforward, just follow Alison’s tutorial. The only thing I did different is the Even theme needs HUGO 0.35+, so I have to set up this.
You need to add a New Variable as HUGO and set to 0.35. The Netlify will install that version for your. Really neat!
You should rename the name, I renamed with jhuang. So whenever you update the Github, for example upload a new post, the Netlify will deploy the website again. It came very fast for me, less than a minute.
Modify YAML meta-data.
To transfer posts from Jekyll to HUGO (Thank God I wrote in Markdown!), I copied all posts from timedreamer.github.io\_posts to jhblog/content/post. Then manually edited the YAML meta-data for each posts. I’m sure there are ways to automatic this, but I just have ~10 posts, so I can do it very quick.
This is the new meta-data looks like:
---
title: "Site moved to Jekyll"
date: 2017-10-01
lastmod: 2018-02-02
draft: false
tags: ["jekyll", "web"]
categories: ["web"]
---
Summary
That’s it! I’m very happy that I moved to HUGO and blogdown. Alison in the posts also recommedn rbind.io domain, but I don’t know how it works so far. I will keep the Netlify for sometime. Netlify provides this awesome free service, I think we should give some credits to it by using the Netlify domain.