UPDATE: The fine folks behind Hugo put together a nice guild that covers the steps involved in getting github pages and Hugo setup.

I thought I would write up my experiences starting a blog that uses R code but that does not use blogdown. Why do I not use blogdown? The short story is that blogdown does not seem quite ready to use, as it is missing some elements to make publishing a blog easy.

The long story is that after spending a good chunk of time helping a student navigate through using blogdown, I found the approach below to be both easier to use and simpler to implement. The disadvantage of this approach is you have to step out of RStudio (which I don’t use anyway) and into the terminal.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work in progress - I am not big on writing blogs, so please forgive me if this is not helpful.

Setup

I recommend following the instructions here for simple setup and deployment scripts. These have worked well for me.

UPDATE: DEPLOYING HUGO-GENERATED WEBSITES ON PERSONAL GITHUB PAGES

Using R code

This is where things get a little tricky. The biggest obstacle is that when you knitr or Sweave a .Rmd to a .md file, the figures (by default) are put in a folder in the working directory. However, when hugo builds the static website, it moves everything around. We need to do two things to prepare our R plots and *.md files for hugo:

1. We need to either create the plots in the /static/ folder, or move them there after knitting the .Rmd

2. We need to make the file path in the .md file point to where hugo will place the figures in the built website, not where they exist now.

I found moving the images easier, though I suspect either will work. The steps are:

1. Create the .Rmd file. Specify fig.path='img/' (the name of this folder does not matter as long as it is consistent for each step). For example:

   ```{r fig.path = "img/"}
   

plot(rnorm(100))

~~~

2. knit the `.Rmd` file. Any figures will end up in a folder named
   `img/` in the current working directory.

3. Copy or move all the contents of `img/` to `{main
   website}/static/img`, where `{main website}` is the top-most
   directory of your website.

4. Change all references in the `.md` file from `img/*` to
   `/img/*`. The tricky thing is you want to do this **after** the
   `.md` file has been programmatically created, not in the `.Rmd`
   source file.
   
Easy, right? I did not want to do this for every single file I might produce, so I
put the whole thing under gnu make using some makefile magic.

`Makefile`
~~~makefile
POSTDIR := content/post
OBJS := $(shell find -name '*.Rmd')
OUTFILES := $(patsubst %.Rmd,%.md,$(OBJS))
KNIT = Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('$<')"

all:$(OUTFILES)

$(OUTFILES):$(OBJS)
  $(KNIT); \
  cp -r img/* ../../static/img/; \
  sed -i 's/img\//\/img\//g' $(OUTFILES)

clean:
  rm $(OUTFILES)
~~~

This finds all the files with the `.Rmd` extension, and converts them
to `.md` files. It then uses `sed` to replace `img/` with `/img/`. You
will need to edit this to reflect your file structure (I have
my `.Rmd` files in `mespe.github.io/content/post/` so I need to
accend 2 directories to get to `static/`).

So, what does the resulting workflow look like?

1. Author a `.Rmd` file
2. Navigate to the correct folder and run `make all` in the terminal

That's it - no blogdown required.