A new blogging workflow

Just disovered the Jekyll – github pages combination. Perfect for a very simple static blog site. I also found a pretty neat integration with RMarkdown which suits me perfectly, as I am mainly using R and will be posting bits and pieces of that.

A summary of how it works…

• Install Jekyll on a local directory and build the site on your disk.
• Create a repo for your github pages site, push the Jekyll directory.
• Done

I'm not going to explain these steps in any detail as they are very well explained in the links above, however if you are an R fanatic like me, it's worth noting the integration with RStudio / RMarkdown. First go install a package called servr.

install.packages("servr")

Thanks for writing and maintainging this Yihui Xie.

The package include a function jekyll(). First create a directory in your Jekyll route directory called _source. Put your .Rmd blog scripts in here and then call the jekyll() function from R with setwd() pointed at your Jekyll route directory. This will compile the script, including any output. The resulting .md files go into the _posts directory and any figures go into figure. Then git commit and git push and your blog is posted.

It really is that easy, now time for my first post…