Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Blogdown

Back in December 2014, I wanted to start a blog. Given that the whole process sounded daunting I started with a free Wordpress site. Now that I’ve become comfortable with R code and the RStudio IDE, I decided to start blogging in my natural habit too… so, I rebuilt my website using the blogdown R package!

Why the switch? Because now I can:

• have direct access to and control over the website source files
  • all files that make up my site are edited locally (in my dropbox) and then pushed to this Github repo
• never again serve ads to readers!¹
• write my blog content out of the RStudio IDE
  • more efficient since I already write up my R code here for data analysis
  • can work offline²
• can use LaTeX math
  • e.g. $q^G_{t+1}>q^*, s^G_{t+1}=1$ (with $G \in \{B,W\}$
  • here [post 1, post 2, post 3] are some post examples that now are much improved with the LaTeX math functionality
• use footnotes³
  • all my posts use footnotes now, which helps the flow of reading
• can include code chunks
  • e.g. here’s a code chunk from this post:

ggplot() + geom_map(data = spr1, aes(map_id = Zip.Code), 
      map = np_dist, fill="gray40", color="gray60") + 
  expand_limits(x = np_dist$long, y = np_dist$lat)+ 
  my_theme()+
  geom_point(data=datadistn, aes(x=X, y=Y, col="District (Neighborhood)"), 
      size=1.5, alpha=1)+
  geom_point(data=datachartn, aes(x=X, y=Y, col="Charter (Neighborhood)"), 
      size=1.5, alpha=1)+
  geom_point(data=datadistc, aes(x=X, y=Y, col="District (Citywide)"), 
      size=1.5, alpha=1)+
  geom_point(data=datachartc, aes(x=X, y=Y, col="Charter (Citywide)"), 
      size=1.5, alpha=1)+
  facet_wrap(~Rpt.Type.Long, ncol=2)+
  ggtitle(expression(atop(bold("Mapping Philly Schools"), 
      atop(italic("Data via OpenDataPhilly; 
      Visual via Alex Albright  (thelittledataset.com)"),""))))+
  scale_colour_manual(values = c("Charter (Citywide)"="#b10026", 
      "District (Citywide)"="#807dba","Charter (Neighborhood)"="red",
      "District (Neighborhood)"="blue"), guide_legend(title="Type of School"))+
  labs(y="", x="")

Making the Blog in RStudio

To build out my blog locally, I followed a few simple steps. I first installed the blogdown package and Hugo, which is an open source static site generator.

install.packages("blogdown")
blogdown::install_hugo()

Then, I created a new R project in a new directory with File>New Project. It was then time to generate a new site and set the theme. Here are all the Hugo themes to choose from. I picked a functional, simple, aesthetically calming hugo theme – XMin!⁴

I then generated a new site:

blogdown::new_site(theme = "yihui/hugo-xmin")

This command creates a whole filing system (for an example site) in the new directory you created. This is fabulous since then you can just edit the pre-built system to deduce how things work. Key things to know:

• posts are .md or .Rmd or .Rmarkdown files in the content folder
• inserting images means calling them from subfolders⁵ in the static folder⁶
• edit the config.toml file to edit the website footer and menu (universal things)
• serve the site (Tools/Addins/Serve Site) to preview it (you only need to click that once in an R session)

Creating a brand new website locally takes just a few minutes using the above steps. However, migrating my content from Wordpress meant copy-and-pasting posts into .md files in the content folder and then completely reformatting the posts for markdown (i.e., adding bold, italics, section names, code chunks, latex math, footnotes, images).⁷

Deployment with Netlify

Once I rebuilt my blog locally, I followed the blogdown book’s suggestion and used Netlify to host the website. Netlify is incredible – it uses continuous deployment from my Github repo to host my blog. So, when I push changes to Github, the site updates. It is that easy. Also, Netlify is FREE!⁸

I followed exactly the steps from section 7 of Alison Presmanes Hill’s blogdown post for Netlify deployment.⁹ Essentially, after building my website locally with RStudio, I moved the whole directory to a new Github repo,¹⁰ and then created a Netlify account and followed their clear-cut steps for connecting to that Github repo.

After a few minutes, my site was deployed and available at https://hopeful-wescoff-036500.netlify.com/! I quickly changed the title, so then it was https://thelittledataset.netlify.com/.

Custom Domain

At this point I could have used an rbind.io domain for free and been done, but… I still wanted to use thelittledataset.com.¹¹ Using the same domain as before is the best case scenario since then old links will still work.¹²

If you (like me a week ago) don’t know a lot about websites, let me explain a few things. There is a registrar of a domain and there is a host. I bought my custom domain through Wordpress back in 2014 and previously used the Wordpress free hosting plan. I pay $18/year to Wordpress for my domain name thelittledataset.com. However, now, Netlify is my host instead of Wordpress. In general, it is nice for the registrar of a domain and the host to be the same, however Netlify doesn’t accept inbound domain transfers. But, there is good news:¹³

If you registered your domain with WordPress.com, you don’t have to use WordPress.com as your host. The domain you registered is yours, and you can use it with any host you want.

So, I kept my domain registration with Wordpress and just changed the domain’s nameservers to “point” at Netlify.¹⁴ So, I still pay $18/year for my domain name to Wordpress, but now I host through Netlify. Goodbye unwanted advertisements, hello improved functionality and workflow!

Boom!

Now, my blogdown-built website exists at https://thelittledataset.com/! Upgrade complete.

Code

Here is my Github repo, where all the source files for my website live! Damn, I love reproducibility.

Resources

If you want to make your own website with blogdown, I highly suggest reading both the blogdown book and Alison Presmanes Hill’s relevant blog post.