Up & running with blogdown in 2021 | Alison Hill

[utterances-bot]

Up & running with blogdown in 2021 | Alison Hill

New year, new blogdown! A guide to getting up and running with blogdown, the Hugo Wowchemy starter-academic theme, GitHub, and Netlify. Not brief.

https://alison.rbind.io/post/new-year-new-blogdown/

[csigauke]

I was following up to this stage when I got errors. May you assist. I ran the stuff below and got errors. I am a novice in this area but will to learn so that I can create my own website.

options(
  # to automatically serve the site on RStudio startup, set this option to TRUE
  blogdown.serve_site.startup = FALSE,
  # to disable knitting Rmd files on save, set this option to FALSE
  blogdown.knit.on_save = FALSE     <- change
  blogdown.author = "Alison Hill",  <- add
  blogdown.ext = ".Rmarkdown",      <- add
  blogdown.subdir = "post"          <- add
)

[apreshill]

Hi there,

What version of the blogdown package are you using? Try xfun::session_info()

And what happened when you ran this code just above that chunk?

# if exists, opens; if not, creates new
blogdown::config_Rprofile() 

[csigauke]

Dear Alison Thank you very much. Let me try that. Kind regards

[eteitelbaum]

Thanks for this awesome tutorial. After reading this, I was finally able to get my site up and running on Netlify.

One thing I got a little confused about was how to commit to Github. Other (I think outdated) tutorials I read emphasized the blogdown::build_site() command and then pushing or publishing the public/ folder. It might be helpful to beginners to briefly explain how to use the usethis::use_git() command to commit the changes in the "Publish site" section of your post.

[apreshill]

Hi there! Yes, I mentioned this as an option where you can drag and drop public/ to Netlify (and linked to a webinar), but I don't recommend committing the public directory to GitHub for publishing.

[csigauke]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

…

On Sun, 3 Jan 2021, 15:49 Alison Presmanes Hill, ***@***.***> wrote: Hi there! Yes, I mentioned this as an option where you can drag and drop public/ to Netlify (and linked to a webinar), but I don't recommend committing the public directory to GitHub for publishing. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#44 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADCPPR3TVUN57EXRBDYRI3DSYBYXBANCNFSM4VREKI4A> .

[phyllospadix]

Really enjoying your tutorial! I have made a lot of progress on my new website and and learning a lot as I go.

I ran into one issue I have not been able to resolve on my own. When I run blogdown::check_site() there is one TODO I can not clear, despite following the instructions (and experimenting a bit with no luck so far. ).

― Checking config.yaml
| Checking "baseURL" setting for Hugo...
○ Found baseURL = "https://karinanielsen.netlify.app/"; nothing to do here!
| Checking "ignoreFiles" setting for Hugo...
● [TODO] Add these items to the "ignoreFiles" setting: "\\.knit\\.md$", "\\.utf8\\.md$"
| Checking setting for Hugo's Markdown renderer...
○ All set! Found the "unsafe" setting for goldmark.
― Check complete: config.yaml

I added the items to the ignoreFiles setting, following the pattern, and saved the config.yaml file:

ignoreFiles:
  - \.ipynb$
  - .ipynb_checkpoints$
  - \.Rmd$
  - \.Rmarkdown$
  - _cache$
  - \\.knit\\.md$
  - \\.utf8\\.md$

When I rerun blogdown::check_site() to see if I cleared this TODO item, I get the same TODO message. It's not seeing what I added. I was able to clear other TODOs with no problem. Not sure what to try next... There don't seem to be any problems as a result of this TODO not clearing, even post commit and push to git, but I am wary now.... Thanks for any tips!

[akseong]

@phillospadix

the filename patterns given by blogdown::check_site() seem to be formatted for a .toml file (rather than a .yaml) . Changing to single slashes should do it.

Thank you Alison! Fantastic resource!

[apreshill]

thank you @phyllospadix and @akseong - I filed an issue on the blogdown repo to fix this bug!

[yihui]

@phyllospadix You have to either follow the instruction in the message exactly and use double quotes, or use single backslashes before .. That is, either

- "\\.knit\\.md$"

or

- \.knit\.md$

is good, but - \\.knit\\.md$ is not.

@akseong The syntax for character arrays is the same for TOML and YAML when you quote the strings (YAML allows no quotes, but TOML does not).

[phyllospadix]

Thanks : @apreshill, @akseong and @yihue ! That cleared the TODO bullet!

[phyllospadix]

that's thanks to @yuihui too (sorry for typo)

[jameshunterbr]

I loved the tutorial. I'm following your workflow, but got hung up at the stage of pushing the content and themes directories to GitHub. Everything else was transferred easily. However, for both of these directories, an index.lock file appears in the .git subdirectory and everything in RStudio freezes. I need to shut down RStudio and then reopen it (new session doesn't work) and use the terminal to remove the offending file with the "rm -f .git/index.lock" command recommended in Stack Overflow. Is there anything different from the other directories about these directories. All the various blogdown checks have been done and all recommendations implemented (although none appear to have much to do with this freeze). Any advice? Thanks, Jim Hunter

[apreshill]

Hi @jameshunterbr - I haven't seen this before! I would probably try installing the dev version of rmarkdown:

remotes::install_github("rstudio/rmarkdown")

And re-installing the dev version of blogdown:

remotes::install_github("rstudio/blogdown")

Be sure to restart your R session before coming back to your project, and try serving site again. If that doesn't work, can you post to the RStudio community forum?

The link is here: https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues/new/choose

[jameshunterbr]

Thanks, Alison. I'm moving the problem over to the rstudio community forum: https://community.rstudio.com/t/92511

[ARMurray]

Yes, there seems to be an issue with academic, I tried for a while to work through it but still can't get it to work, I did however have success with: blogdown::new_site(theme = "lxndrblz/anatole")

[dbmurray]

This is an excellent blog....however as a newbie to r markdown, it would have been good for a small explanation of what 'knitting' is. I'm still not sure if I understand what it does.

[apreshill]

Hi @juniperover @tehillamo @sammo3182 @sleeds50 @ARMurray -

This has been fixed by the amazing @yihui in the development version of the blogdown package:
rstudio/blogdown@16f85a5

https://pkgs.rstudio.com/blogdown/news/index.html#changes-in-blogdown-version-1-4-unreleased

Please try:

remotes::install_github('rstudio/blogdown')

[jhchou]

Any guidance on getting DT::datatable() to work in Hugo / wowchemy? I am having the same issue described here, with only the header row showing. I saw but did not understand how to implement your workaround. Thanks for any help!

[sammo3182]

Thank you for the information, but as Yihui suggested, I will give Apero a try! Amazing project, Alison @apreshill . Thank you!❤

[schwebels]

Hi Alison - What a great tutorial!
I am stuck at the 'hi hugo' content post. When I knit the Rmarkdown file I can see the rendered output in Rstudio Viewer, but when I look at it in the local host page, the summary and plot do not render. It looks like "Summary(Orange)##Tree age Circumfrence##3.7 Min...."
What am I doing wrong?

[eteitelbaum]

Hi Allison, It seems like Yihui's comment entails that blogdown won't be supporting the Hugo Academic theme for much longer. How will this affect existing Hugo Academic users? Will we be able to continue to update our sites? Is there a strong and immediate need to switch over to the Apero theme? When we make a switch, will we basically have to redo everything? It has been such a huge investment to get my Hugo Academic themed site up and running and I am feeling wary about having to make a bunch more investments to learn a new theme, redesign my site, etc. Thanks,

…

On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 3:52 AM Yue Hu ***@***.***> wrote: Thank you for the information, but as Yihui suggested <rstudio/blogdown#638 (comment)>, I will give Apero a try! Amazing project, Alison @apreshill <https://github.com/apreshill> . Thank you!❤ — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#44 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AO53QYXC57SPRWRCQ44LHNLTZ6ZM7ANCNFSM4VREKI4A> .

-- Emmanuel Teitelbaum, Associate Professor Department of Political Science and The Elliott School for International Affairs George Washington University Managing Editor, Journal of Development Studies <http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjds20/current> Phone: (202) 994-9125 Website: http://emmanuelteitelbaum.com Office Hours: Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. <https://calendly.com/emmanuel-teitelbaum> Zoom: https://gwu-edu.zoom.us/my/emmanuel.teitelbaum

[eteitelbaum]

P.S. I scrolled up the thread and found that you had basically already answered my question: "I know though that it feels not great to be told that you need to consider switching themes after investing lots of time, energy, and material development into the Hugo Academic theme. But this is where we sit now. We'll work to see if we can make it user-friendly again, but at the end of the day, these are ultimately decisions made by individual Hugo theme authors." Yeah, it does feel not great, but at least I have a bit more of an understanding of what is going on. Thanks. On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 8:29 PM Emmanuel Teitelbaum < ***@***.***> wrote:

…

Hi Allison, It seems like Yihui's comment entails that blogdown won't be supporting the Hugo Academic theme for much longer. How will this affect existing Hugo Academic users? Will we be able to continue to update our sites? Is there a strong and immediate need to switch over to the Apero theme? When we make a switch, will we basically have to redo everything? It has been such a huge investment to get my Hugo Academic themed site up and running and I am feeling wary about having to make a bunch more investments to learn a new theme, redesign my site, etc. Thanks, On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 3:52 AM Yue Hu ***@***.***> wrote: > Thank you for the information, but as Yihui suggested > <rstudio/blogdown#638 (comment)>, > I will give Apero a try! Amazing project, Alison @apreshill > <https://github.com/apreshill> . Thank you!❤ > > — > You are receiving this because you commented. > Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub > <#44 (comment)>, > or unsubscribe > <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AO53QYXC57SPRWRCQ44LHNLTZ6ZM7ANCNFSM4VREKI4A> > . > -- Emmanuel Teitelbaum, Associate Professor Department of Political Science and The Elliott School for International Affairs George Washington University Managing Editor, Journal of Development Studies <http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjds20/current> Phone: (202) 994-9125 Website: http://emmanuelteitelbaum.com Office Hours: Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. <https://calendly.com/emmanuel-teitelbaum> Zoom: https://gwu-edu.zoom.us/my/emmanuel.teitelbaum

-- Emmanuel Teitelbaum, Associate Professor Department of Political Science and The Elliott School for International Affairs George Washington University Managing Editor, Journal of Development Studies <http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjds20/current> Phone: (202) 994-9125 Website: http://emmanuelteitelbaum.com Office Hours: Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. <https://calendly.com/emmanuel-teitelbaum> Zoom: https://gwu-edu.zoom.us/my/emmanuel.teitelbaum

[yihui]

It seems like Yihui's comment entails that blogdown won't be supporting the Hugo Academic theme for much longer.

@eteitelbaum I can't say for sure. It depends how hard it is to follow the development of this theme. It was hard for us at times, but we figured out solutions each time. I just don't know how much longer we can enjoy the current peace. That said, if you are using the academic theme, I strongly recommend that:

1. You pin the Hugo version (run blogdown::check_site());
2. and pin the theme once you have got a working version (never update it unless absolutely necessary).

Then you can pretty much enjoy the peace forever. Most of the time, the problem arises because people use or update to the very latest version of the theme. If you have an older version that works well, I'd recommend that you just stick to it.

[bcrossman]

Any chance you might point me in the currently preferred direction for handling htmlwidgets, such as a data table, with the new blogdown / wowchemy / netlify structure? widgetframe was a particularly easy solution but it doesn't seem to be working.

[atakanekiz]

Many thanks for this amazingly helpful blog post. I have a question regarding the image scoping, I would appreciate it if you can shed some light. Wowchemy tutorial says the images can be placed under /assets/media/ folder starting with Wowchemy v5.1. Prior to this release, they were to be found under static folder.

My question has to do with the difference in scoping when I'm referring to an image in the yaml front matter or within the post itself. In short, YAML headers scope for images in /assets/media/ while post bodies scope for images in static/media/:

Let the image paths be:
/assets/media/IMG_IN_ASSETS_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg
/static/media/IMG_IN_STATIC_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg

---
# This works in YAML
  background:
    image: IMG_IN_ASSETS_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg
    image_darken: 0.65
    image_parallax: true
    image_position: center
    image_size: cover
    text_color_light: true
  spacing:
    padding: ["20px", "0", "20px", "0"]
---

---
# This doesn't work in YAML
  background:
    image: IMG_IN_STATIC_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg
    image_darken: 0.65
    image_parallax: true
    image_position: center
    image_size: cover
    text_color_light: true
  spacing:
    padding: ["20px", "0", "20px", "0"]
---

When I try to insert an image to the post body only static folder is scoped

# adding images under `static` folder works
![](/media/IMG_IN_STATIC_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg) # works 

# images under `/assets/media/` aren't found. I tried a few things here:
![](/media/IMG_IN_ASSETS_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg)
![](/assets/media/IMG_IN_ASSETS_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg)
![](../assets/media/IMG_IN_ASSETS_MEDIA_FOLDER.jpg)

[nvelden]

When converting some of my old posts to the new Hugo Apero theme I noticed that .Rmd files are rendered directly to .html files and thus any Apero theme specific setting (eg. comments, TOC) are not rendered. Converting the files to .Rmarkdown solved the issue. Just putting it here in case somebody runs into the same issue.

[rikudoukarthik]

Hi Alison! First, thanks a lot for this brilliant theme! I am having fun exploring it and building up my site.

My issue is that I am unable to get the "On this page" section to show up in my sidebar. This post of yours is a non-series post with a sidebar layout, so I looked at your various YAMLs and copied the same to my blog post. Even though the small link icon appears beside each of my headings in the body, the "table of contents" of sorts doesn't appear in my sidebar. I couldn't find a particular attribute to specify this in your code. In the YAML for your Quarto post I noticed you'd specified the text for this heading ("On this page"), but I still didn't see anything to turn it on/off.

What am I missing here? My GitHub page is here.

[bayeslearner]

Hi, just here to confirm the following theme is not supported, correct? Tried starter-academic as well to no avail.

R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18) -- "Camp Pontanezen"
Copyright (C) 2021 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
blogdown: github version 1.10.7

― Creating your new site
| Installing the theme wowchemy/starter-hugo-online-course from github.com
trying URL 'https://github.com/wowchemy/starter-hugo-online-course/archive/main.tar.gz'
downloaded 2.0 MB

trying URL 'https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/archive/v1.0.0 // indirect.tar.gz'
trying URL 'https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/archive/v1.0.0 // indirect.tar.gz'
curl: (3) URL using bad/illegal format or missing URL
--2022-08-01 11:52:03--  https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/archive/v1.0.0%20//%20indirect.tar.gz
Resolving github.com (github.com)... 140.82.114.4
Connecting to github.com (github.com)|140.82.114.4|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://codeload.github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/tar.gz/v1.0.0%20/%20indirect [following]
--2022-08-01 11:52:03--  https://codeload.github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/tar.gz/v1.0.0%20/%20indirect
Resolving codeload.github.com (codeload.github.com)... 140.82.113.10
Connecting to codeload.github.com (codeload.github.com)|140.82.113.10|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2022-08-01 11:52:03 ERROR 404: Not Found.

Error in xfun::download_file(url, gz, mode = "wb") : 
  No download method works (auto/wininet/wget/curl/lynx)

[yihui]

@bayeslearner Please see rstudio/blogdown#722 (comment).