WordPress Blogging with R in 3 Steps

A few people have emailed me and enquired about the use of tools mentioned at the end of this post to make blogposts with embedded R-commands. Below is a small step-by-step walkthrough of how to accomplish this.

1. Write your blog post in a simple text file, you can include formatting using asciidoc syntax. Let’s call the file workflow.Rnw:

   Letters
   -------
   
   First we will display all the letters.
   
   <<>>=
   letters
   @
   
   And then only the first five letters of the alphabet.
   
   <<>>=
   letters[1:5]
   @

2. Process workflow.Rnw with Sweave using driver provided by ascii package and create workflow.txt, a file in Asciidoc format.
   

   > library(ascii) > Sweave("workflow.Rnw", driver = RweaveAsciidoc, + syntax = "SweaveSyntaxNoweb") Writing to file workflow.txt Processing code chunks ... 1 : echo term verbatim 2 : echo term verbatim You can now run asciidoc on 'workflow.txt'

   The asciidoc file workflow.txt looks like this:

   Letters
   -------
   
   First we will display all the letters.
   
   ----
   > letters
    [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m"
   [14] "n" "o" "p" "q" "r" "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z"
   ----
   
   And then only the first five letters of the alphabet.
   
   ----
   > letters[1:5]
   [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e"
   ----

3. Use Python script blogpost.py written by Stuart Rackham to upload the post to a WordPress host. The host and login details are contained in blogpost.py.conf.
   

   Note	Prerequisites are Python >2.5 and Asciidoc.

   python blogpost.py post --conf blogpost.py.conf workflow.txt

   will render the following entry:

Letters

First we will display all the letters.

> letters
 [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m"
[14] "n" "o" "p" "q" "r" "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z"

And then only the first five letters of the alphabet.

> letters[1:5]
[1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e"