Same Content, New Look

data science programming R R Studio

My site has a brand new look.

Danielle Brantley https://gist.github.com/danielle-b
12-14-2020

When I first decided to start my Data Sci Dani blog, I did a lot of research into website builders in an effort to find one that would be easiest to use. After doing much research, I decided on WordPress because I was most familiar with it, having previously blogged on the platform and used it for school. It was also cheaper than what I had previously used.

WordPress was a great option for me for a while but I longed to cut costs further. At the time I was not working and with no money coming in, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. I remembered the very first website I made many years ago and I recalled that it was a lot less expensive than than using a CMS service. I was looking for a way to build a website that was simple and didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles.

I did some preliminary research and came across Hugo and Github Pages. I had heard a bit about Github Pages but not Hugo so I decided to take to Twitter:

I got a few responses about Jekyll and Github Pages but it looked a bit too complex for me. Several folks suggested Hugo and Blogdown but I was overwhelmed by the number of themes to choose from. Then I recieved a reply by Shannon Pileggi better known as PipingHotData on Twitter. She shared a bit about her experience with blogdown before sharing that she now uses distill, with a link to the distill documentation. I had never heard of distill so I checked out the documentation. As I read the documentation, I had an aha moment. This was exactly what I was looking for.

So one Saturday morning, I looked up distill on YouTube and came across this distill tutorial by Matt Crump:

Blogging with R and Github Using Distill

I followed his video step-by-step and I was surprised by how easily and how quickly I was able to build a distill blog.

The most time-consuming part of building the site at this point was bringing all my content from WordPress to this new distill site. I actually just copied and pasted my posts from WordPress to Distill(I’m sure there is an easier way to do this that I haven’t figured out yet!).

There were a few hiccups along the way. Somehow I accidentially deleted the folder with all my distill website content from my computer. Fortunately, I had already uploaded everything to Github so I downloaded those files, deleted the repo and then created a new repo with the downloaded files. I then had issues resizing my images. I asked twitter about reszizing photos in R Markdown and was directed to this article. I also had trouble publishing the site to Netlify, a free deployment service. It turns out that I had to change the output directory in the yaml file to "_site" before publishing the site. I found these blog posts by Shamindra Shrotriya and Thomas Mock to be incredibly helpful. Additionally, I had to transfer my domain name away from WordPress to another domain provider.

After all the hiccups, my website is finally up and running. I decided to use the Tidymodels theme by Desirée De Leon. There are a few things I want to work on:

  1. How to set up an email subscription. I’d love for folks to recieve an email when I’ve published a new post.
  2. How to set up a gallery of featured/most recent posts.
  3. How to implement Google Analytics on my site for tracking activity.
  4. The look of my site needs just a bit of tweaking. I want to to add a favicon, a logo, search bar, and maybe change the colors.

As you can see, the site is still a work in progress but I’m happy with how far the site has come.

Until next time…

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Brantley (2020, Dec. 14). Data Sci Dani: Same Content, New Look. Retrieved from https://datascidani.com/posts/2020-12-14-same-content-new-look/

BibTeX citation

@misc{brantley2020same,
  author = {Brantley, Danielle},
  title = {Data Sci Dani: Same Content, New Look},
  url = {https://datascidani.com/posts/2020-12-14-same-content-new-look/},
  year = {2020}
}