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Delve into building a personal website using R. Learn about GitHub, Hugo, Netlify, and Google Analytics to customize and launch your site effortlessly.

Launching a personal website_ blog_ or portfolio using R-01.png

rwebsite.tar.gz

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Exercise

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R is one of the major programming languages for working with big data. This course will walk you through building a personal website using R.

To create a website, you don’t need any prior web development experience. This course will introduce you to various freely available tools, including GitHub, Hugo, Netlify, and Google Analytics. This course teaches you how to use R to create a comprehensive website utilizing these tools. You’ll be able to modify a theme and personalize it according to your needs.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to build a personal website, blog, or portfolio using R.

Launching a Personal Website Using R

# Project directory structure

A **blogdown** application project consists of numerous files that build the website. We can see some of the notable files and folders in the directory tree below: 

my-website/
├─ config/
│  ├─ _default/
│  │  ├─ languages.toml
│  │  ├─ menus.en.toml
│  │  ├─ params.toml
├─ content/
│  ├─ english/
│  │  ├─ post/
│  │  │  ├─ post1.md
│  │  ├─ _index.md
│  │  ├─ about.md
├─ static/
│  ├─ favicons/
│  ├─ images/
├─ themes/
│  ├─ anatole/
│  │  ├─ assets/
│  │  │  ├─ css/
│  │  │  ├─ js/
│  │  │  ├─ scss/
├─ config.yaml

* The `config/` directory and the configuration file `config.yaml` are used to specify different settings for the website, including the  title, language and author.

* The main content of the file goes into the `content/` directory. This content can be in the form of pages or posts in Markdown (`.md`) or R Markdown (`.Rmd`) files.

* The `static/` directory contains all the static assets including images and icons that are used on the website.

* The `themes/` directory contains the files associated with a particular theme. We also have the option to load multiple themes in the directory and add it to the `config.yaml` file.

We've prepared the project directory below so that it's easy to interact with and view. If we want to create a new project, we can find a step-by-step guide in the "Appendix".

# Update the base URL
Updating the base URL is critical to ensure that our website and its dependencies are built and deployed correctly. In the `config.yaml` file, we can change the `baseURL` parameter from `https://example.com` to `/`. The default `example.com` domain name is just a placeholder, and switching to `/` will enable us to deploy our website behind a domain name.

# Make basic edits

We'll notice that the default website contains placeholder text such as “My Blog” and “Call me Jane” on the homepage after we run the code at the end of this lesson.  

Here are the steps we can take to edit these placeholder text examples:

1. We can edit "My Blog" on the homepage by navigating to `config/_default/languages.toml` and changing the `title` parameter.

2. We can edit the "Call me Jane" text on the homepage by navigating to `config/_default/params.toml` and changing the `description` parameter.


Let's get acquainted with a blogdown website project.

Getting Started

Creating and Deploying the Website

Personalizing the Website

Wrapping Up

Appendix

Build a Website From Scratch

Project directory structure