I’ve wanted to put a website together for awhile. I’ve never really made it a priority. I started thinking about it more when I came across Nick Strayer’s datadrivencv. My original idea was to host a more detailed version of my CV as a website. Since I can never do anything half way I decided to do a full website, blog included! So here we are. I’m not going to do a line for line “how I made my website” kind of post. There are already plenty of those. I’m going to do a high level overview with some hints & tips I picked up along the way.

Very first thing I did was go straight to the source: the blogdown book. This helped me get the basics started. I skimmed some parts & then decided to dive right in because that’s how I do it. You’ll soon figure out I love to jump right in without reading the documentation. It’s a particular quirk of mine. So let’s get into it!

Pick a theme ¶

You need to pick a Hugo theme. Those can be found here. I spent waaaaay too much on this. I want everything to be pretty so I tend to overthink aesthetic choices. I had an idea in my mind about the general style I wanted. There seem to be 2 basic designs: all one page that you can scroll through/link to different sections or each section is a separate page. I wanted the separate page style so that narrowed down my choices. From there, I knew I wanted something more on the minimalist side. I actually tried two or three other themes before I settled on the current one: Call me Sam.

I did not read any documentation for this theme (Are we noticing a trend?). Therefore, I had some issues with things not working “correctly”. This Stack Overflow question answered a very specific question. I could have also avoided this issue if I had at least skimmed the readme. My suggestion is to read the Readme of the theme you’ve chosen!

Now that you’ve chosen a theme (and read the readme), start a new project in R & run

blogdown::new_site(theme = 'victoriadrake/hugo-theme-sam')

This will set up all you need for the website, uses the theme you’ve selected, etc & then previews it for you. From here, you can start tweaking your theme. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail here. The most significant changes I made were changing the background color & highlight color. I also messed around with the syntax highlighting in code chunks. I would experiment with all these changes before you add any actual content. I deleted the whole project & restarted multiple times before I got to where I was ready to add my own content.

Adding your own content ¶

This is where things get a bit messy. I tried a couple different ways to add new posts. I finally landed on using the “New Post” option in the “Addins” menu. A helpful tip I picked up along the way is that you can set a project level “.Rprofile”. You can use this to set defaults for each new post. This works better than my previous method of cutting & pasting the YAML at the beginning of each file. The command below allows you to edit the “.Rprofile” file associated with your project.

file.edit('./.Rprofile')

Another thing I’ve done is kind of bypass blogdown all together. I will fully admit I don’t understand the internals of how Hugo & blogdown work together. I did figure out that to get the syntax highlighting & pages to render the way I wanted it made more sense to use *.Rmarkdown files. This blog post started me down the road of using a bit more Hugo & less blogdown. The general idea is I run hugo server --disableFastRender in the terminal. I edit my index.Rmarkdown file, knit it & then I can see the changes on http://localhost:1313/ in my browser. Once I’ve made all the changes I want, I kill the Hugo server running & then run hugo in the terminal to build the website.

Page bundles ¶

There are different ways to organize everything. I recommend using page bundles. They use a specific structure where everything related to a post is in a single directory. I found this easier to understand than some of the other methods. My understanding is that page bundles are a relatively new feature. Alison Hill has a great post about page bundles here if you want to dig more into it.

Push to Github ¶

I’m using Github to host this page for right now. This may change in the future but it works for right now. There are a ton of tutorials on how to get your web page up & running so I won’t go into it here. I will, however, point out that the only directory you need to push to Github is /public. That was not immediately clear to me.

Depending on how complex you want to make this, you could use Github issues as a way to keep track of ideas. I’ve been doing that to keep the list of things I potentially want to do with this site all in one place. I’ve also been using branches to add things to the website. This can be a great way to practice pull requests/branches/issues/etc. on Github if that’s something that you need to work on!

Publications page ¶

I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight Nick Strayer’s datadrivencv R package. The basic premise is you keep your data in Google sheets & pull from there to create your CV. I had originally tried to pull/wrangle the data for the Publications page from both Google Scholar & using my ORCID. It just never seemed to work quite right! I finally decided to put all my publication data into a Google Sheet & pull it from there, similar to Nick’s package. Thanks for the idea, Nick!

If you have any specific questions, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.