My first task in this professional development journey was to create a blog to record my progress and keep track of my projects. The old me would have set something up using Wordpress or Blogger, but in keeping with the goal of learning new things, I decided to try to set up a blog in RStudio using blogdown and Hugo.
Total time: 356 minutes (~ 6 hours)
This project took me just under 6 hours (spread over 8 days instead of 7). The time breakdown is shown below, and doesn’t include the time it took to write this post almost a week later.
| Tue 5.28 | Wed 5.29 | Thu 5.30 | Fri 5.31 | Sat 6.1 | Sun 6.2 | Mon 6.3 | Tue 6.4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 185 | 5 | 9 | 57 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100 |
I started by reading the first chapter of the Blogdown book as recommended in the README on the Blogdown github page. I found it pretty easy to work through the steps in the book to create a blog locally using RStudio. I first created the default blog (with blogdown::new_site()) and explored the different menu options as described in the book chapter. I edited the config.toml file to personalize the blog and created a test post using R Markdown. Once I was comfortable with the mechanics of how blogdown works in RStudio, I moved on to choosing a theme for my blog.
Still following the instruction in Chapter 1 of the Blogdown book, I perused the themes at https://themes.gohugo.io/. My goal was to pick something that was fairly simple and clean looking. I initially chose Ezhil and created a new blog with this theme, following the book’s instructions to create a new blog with the theme rather than add the theme to my existing default blog. As before, I personalized the blog by editing the config.toml file to reflect my blog name and subtitle and updated the links to my Github and Twitter pages. I again created a test post and previewed it in RStudio.
I briefly had buyers remorse, deleted all of the files for my blog, and decided to try a different theme that seemed to have more options for the blog’s layout and personalization. After creating and experimenting with this new theme, I ultimately decided to go back to my original choice. Overall, I probably spent over two hours trying to decide and switching themes before deciding to just move forward with the one I had originally chosen, and I could have spent much more time trying to choose the “perfect” theme. However, my impression is that if I want to change to a different theme down the line, it shouldn’t be too much trouble since the one I’m currently using doesn’t have too many bells and whistles.
I had originally planned to use Github pages to deploy my blog to the web, but after reading Chapter 3: Deployment in the Blogdown book I decided to go with Netlify instead. As before, I basically just followed the instructions in the book to get things set up. First, I created a new repository on Github to host my blog. I then created a .gitignore file so that certain files would be ignored when pushing to the repo; I basically used the same .gitignore file as used for the Simply Statistics blog.
Next I signed up for a Netlify account, linked it to my Github repo, and built the blog for the first time. I had an error on the first build – it was “building” for more than 10 minutes, when the book had seemed to suggest it might take a few minutes but not longer. I eventually stopped the build and saw an error message that the version of Hugo I had requested for the build was too outdated and not compatible with my chosen theme (I had used version 0.24.1 as shown in the example in the book). I checked the Hugo website for the most recent version (0.55.6 – much more recent!), updated on Netlify, and successfully deployed my blog!
On a whim I decided to see if the domain name “5haw.com” was available on GoDaddy.com and it was! It cost $11.34 for a two-year term, plus another $20 to keep the domain registration private. It was very easy to link this domain name to my blog through the Netlify site. I also ended up having my nameserver managed by Netlify by following the instructions on the Netlify site.
I mostly just followed instructions in the Blogdown book to get my blog up and running. Chapters 1 and 3 gave me explicit instructions on setting up and deploying my blog. I also found Chapter 2 helpful to give me an idea of how file structure works within Hugo. I skipped Chapters 4 and 5 but did skim through the Appendices. Overall I found it to be an excellent resource. I definitely don’t know all the ins and outs of using Hugo to create a website, but I feel confident I could now use Blogdown/Hugo to create a personal or academic site as well.