I am very excited that I can start writing blogs with Markdown (even better, Rmarkdown), and then push the posts to GitHub. Then done!! The posts will show up at https://zhenguozhang.zone/ hosted at https://netlify.com. I don’t need worry deployment of the website.

For this to work, I used the excellent R package blogdown, written by the R celebrity Yihui Xie. Since the process is so amazing, I would like to share it with you, so you can also benefit from it.

Steps

1. Install the package blogdown in Rstudio by typing:

install.packages(“blogdown”)

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2. Create a website project by clicking the menus/buttons
in Rstudio in the following order:

    **File** --> **New Project...** --> **New Directory**
--> **Website using blogdown**. Then you will see the
following screen:

    ![](/post/images/project-window.png)

    Input the project folder name (say "test-blog") 
under "Directory name" 
and select where to put it by clicking "Browse...".
And finally click **Create Project**. Keep the other
options as default.

    blogdown will handle the rest, including installing
necessary software.

3. Click the **New Post** under the menu **Addins**,
fill the relevant information, and then you can start
writing the post in the edit pane of Rstudio. After editting,
save the post.

4. Preview the website locally by click **Serve Site**
under the menu **Addins**.

5. Push it to Github if it looks good. 
First, create a repository at Github, and let's say the
repository name is "test-blog" and the github username
is 'fortune9'. Then, in the command line,
go to the site folder "test-blog" created in the Step 2,
and type:
```bash
git init
git add *
git commit -m "my blog started"
# important: change repository and username portions in following URLs
git add remote origin https://github.com/fortune9/test-blog.git
git push -u origin master

6. Deploy the website to netlify.com. Go to the website https://www.netlify.com/ to sign up a free account, and link your github repository to create a website. See https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/09/29/a-step-by-step-guide-deploying-on-netlify/ for step-by-step guide. When configurating the settings, keep “Branch” as “master”, “Dir” as “public”, and “Build command” as “hugo”.

7. Enjoy your website and blogging. 😄

Afterword

1. You may fail in the deployment. If this happens, that may be caused by the lower version of hugo used by netlify. To solve this, add a file “netlify.toml” in the root of site folder “test-blog”, and put the following code in it:

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[context.production.environment]
  HUGO_VERSION = "0.45.1"

Then commit and push the changes to github, and check the deployment in a couple of minutes.

2. You can see Yihui’s talk on blogdown at https://www.rstudio.com/resources/videos/create-and-maintain-websites-with-r-markdown-and-blogdown/ In the talk, he also demonstrated how to type SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPER fast using HHKB.

3. The blogdown is built on hugo, an automatic static site generator, so you may learn it if you want to configure the website better.

4. Actually, I tried to build my blog firstly with hugo directly by following the instruction at https://github.com/netlify/victor-hugo and https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/09/21/a-step-by-step-guide-victor-hugo-on-netlify/, but I failed during rendering the website, possibly because the files are too old to be used by the lastest software.

5. I started to use blogdown because of the inspiration from Peng Zhao and Yixuan.

Please write me if you have any comments or questions.

Last modified on 2018-07-27