I have been a fan of R and RMarkdown for years, since plouging my way throug the John Hopkins series of Data Science in R courses at Coursera back in 2014.
I’ve enjoyed seeing RStudio evolve over the last few years, getting more and more powerful and more and more interactive. First fantastic visualisations using ggplot, then came RMarkdown from the prolific Yihui Xie.
Well, RMarkdown keeps evolving; we now have Bookdown and Blogdown too.
Blogdowns purpose is to create blogs. Why? Let me quote the authors:
If you have experience with creating websites, you may naturally ask what the benefits of using R Markdown are, and how blogdown is different from existing popular website platforms, such as WordPress. There are two major highlights of blogdown:
It produces a static website, meaning the website only consists of static files such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images, etc. You can host the website on any web server (see Chapter 3 for details). The website does not require server-side scripts such as PHP or databases like WordPress does. It is just one folder of static files. We will explain more benefits of static websites in Chapter 2, when we introduce the static website generator Hugo.
The website is generated from R Markdown documents (R is optional, i.e., you can use plain Markdown documents without R code chunks). This brings a huge amount of benefits, especially if your website is related to data analysis or R programming. Being able to use Markdown implies simplicity and more importantly, portability (e.g., you are giving yourself the chance to convert your blog posts to PDF and publish to journals or even books in the future). R Markdown gives you the benefits of dynamic documents — all your results, such as tables, graphics, and inline values, can be computed and rendered dynamically from R code, hence the results you present on your website are more likely to be reproducible. An additional yet important benefit of using R Markdown is that you will be able to write technical documents easily, due to the fact that blogdown inherits the HTML output format from bookdown (Xie 2016). For example, it is possible to write LaTeX math equations, BibTeX citations, and even theorems and proofs if you want.
Blogdown has just become my favourite (only) web-site-generator.
I simply love working in RStudio, and full website generation is just what I’ve been looking for.
There is still a learning curve; but there’s a lot to like in here. I especially like the integration with Disqus. Disqus allows for static web sites to accept and respond to comments, by having Disqus do all the hard work of managing the comments, allowing me to focus on a simple, static web site.