I’m finally getting around to starting a blog/personal site.
I’ve thought about it for a long time but never set down to actually do it. There are several motivations behind this blog:
I find more and more that other people’s personal blogs – as well as sites like R-bloggers and R Views – are the best place to learn new methods, learn about new packages, and to be inspired by the work of other people. In time, I hope that some of the material on this page ends up useful to someone else.
Just as importantly, I find that I get curious about things and tend to start projects chasing these curiosities but most of this work never sees the light of day. An occasional tweet here, an email to some friends there, but the work to public output ratio isn’t there. It’s not there because I seldom take these thoughts and mini projects completely across the line. The additional work to polish up, share, and present never quite seems to be worthwhile. My hope is that setting up this blog will encourage me to finish these kinds of projects and to share them with others.
The workflow for a static website/blog is really straightforward nowadays. This site is written entirely in rmarkdown using the blogdown package by Yihiu Xie which takes advantage of the Hugo framework for easily generating static pages. I work primarily in R nowadays, so being able to take work from raw data to live webpage using only RStudio and a terminal window is pretty neat. This page uses the ghostwriter Hugo theme.