Use Rmd files for content pages in blogdown website - r

I am considering switching my website to blogdown. My current set-up only uses .Rmd files with a less-than-ideal blog implementation. It seems like one advantage of blogdown is that it automates the blogging part of the website (posts, lists, dates, etc.) and allows RMarkdown. This is my main motivation to switch. However, the downside, I think, is that I cannot create content pages in RMarkdown (i.e., content > about.Rmd)... it seems this is limited to .md files. I would like to use .Rmd for all the pages so that I can incorporate r code. My question: Is it possible to create .Rmd content pages in blogdown?
EDIT...
Specifically, I created by hand research.Rmd in the content folder. I can include a trivial example, such as...
`r 2 + 2`
and when I run serve_site() the r code is not rendered. I can knit the file by hand, but the file does not have the style of the theme I am using and once I again try to serve the site the file is rendered as if it were a .md file.
```
EDIT 2...
You can reproduce the behavior I am referring to by doing the following...
Create a new blowdown site: new_site(dir = ".", theme = 'gcushen/hugo-academic')
Create new content: new_content('test/index.Rmd')
Set draft to false and add trivial r code: I used 2 + 2 as shown above.
Serve site and go to test/index.html. There is no r code rendered.

From your Edit 2, you seem to have fallen into a common Hugo trap: content/test/index.Rmd does not necessarily generate test/index.html. Hugo uses the convention _index.md to generate a homepage for a subfolder, and you have to use content/test/_index.Rmd in your case. For content/about.Rmd or content/research.Rmd, they will generate about/index.html and research/index.html respectively by default.

Related

TOC not displaying in Blogdown post (Hugo theme Even)

I have added a new post to my site made using blogdown. Despite the presence of toc: yes in my YAML, the table of contents is not displaying on the rendered webpage. I've also tried adding:
output:
blogdown::html_page:
toc: yes
which doesn't solve the problem either. I'm currently using the Even theme (Hugo), and in the .config file, I also have toc: yes present.
I checked out this post, but I wasn't able to find the files they are referencing, nor those particular lines of code. Also my issue is with new posts, not the home page.
Does anyone know what the problem might be?
EDIT: I can see in my index.html file (generated from index.Rmd) that the code for a toc is present. For some reason, it's not being rendered on the page?
TL;DR Solution: to get the table of contents to show in the Even theme, your posts must render to the .markdown format instead of .html format. In order to make this happen, you simple use the .Rmarkdown file extension when creating the post instead of .Rmd. Now, when you use blogdown::serve_site(), your post will use the output format .markdown instead of .html. Your post will now render with a beautiful table of contents.
A note for latex math mode users: when typing in your .Rmarkdown document, you will now have to escape your $'s and \'s. So for example, $\le 0.2$
will have to be typed as \$\\le 0.2\$.
I hope this overly elaborate problem and solution is helpful to someone!
I figured out a workaround for this.
First, I'm not sure how to provide a reproducible example in this context, but I can say that if you open an RStudio project, run blogdown::new_site(theme = "olOwOlo/hugo-theme-even"), add a New Post using the Addin dropdown menu, add some headings to your post, make toc:true, use Serve Site from the Addin menu. You will see your post working fine in every respect - only it will be missing the table of contents.
Workaround:
I don't know why, but it appears that the table of contents will show if I keep a copy of the post in .md format, and delete the .html document. The default behavior seems to use the .html document if it is present; failing that, it will use the .md document.
To keep a copy of the post in .md format, use the following code in the YAML of your .Rmd document:
output:
blogdown::html_page:
keep_md: yes
Serve the site, delete the .html document (but keep the .md document), and the table of contents appears in all of its glory (you may have to actually knit the file to get the .md).
I don't know why this works...I've seen elsewhere (although I can't seem to find the post again) that some hugo themes don't play nicely with .html files, and prefer .md files, and that appears to be the case for the Even theme.
In sum: My workaround for now is thus to work on my posts, and when I'm done, knit the document with the option above, delete the .html file, and be on my way.
Caveat: blogdown seems to automatically re-render all the old posts when using Serve Site. According to this stack answer, Serve Site should only render documents that have undergone changes. Regardless, the old posts are most definitely being re-rendered, even when working on an unrelated post. I'm not sure if this behavior is attributable to blogdown per se, or the RStudio project.
I tried going to Tools -> Project Options -> Build Tools, and unchecking the boxes "Preview site when building", yet the behavior persists. Which means I will have to continuously delete these new .html files for all old posts every time a I make a change to any other file. Currently I only have one post, so not a big deal...yet.
If someone knows of a solution to this caveat, I would be extremely grateful. If I find one, I will edit this question and add it.
EDIT: it appears that blogdown will re-render the old post if there is no .html document present. Otherwise, it does not re-render it.
EDIT 2: Aha! According to the answer to this question, simply changing the file extension of the blog post from .Rmd to .Rmarkdown will produce a .markdown document instead of a .html document.

Linking to other pages on Simple R markdown website

I'm developing a Simple R Markdown Website, and want to include a few links to other .Rmd generated HTML pages on the home page.
Simply, I want to open up "detailed-desc.html" which is rendered from "detailed-desc.Rmd", on clicking a text element on the "index.Rmd" file. I'm not sure how this can be done.
If all your .Rmd files and their rendered HTML results are in the same directory, then you can use the regular markdown syntax and reference the HTML files for links.
[Detailed Description](detailed-desc.html)
Detailed Description
With a more complicated site folder structure, it is just
[Detailed Description](./path/to/your/folder/detailed-desc.html)
Detailed Description

Building blogdown site twice leads to incorrect formatting

Rebuilding blogdown site is not rendering correctly for some themes.
Having created a new directory using the R Project Wizard in RStudio, I create a new site using a custom theme such as "AlexFinn/simple-a" or "zwbetz-gh/vanilla-bootstrap-hugo-theme" with blogdown::new_site(theme = "AlexFinn/simple-a"). Once created, I add the following to to config.TOML; ignoreFiles = ["\\.Rmd$", "\\.Rmarkdown$", "_files$", "_cache$"]
At this point, all is working as expected and I get a properly formatted example site.
When I press the 'Build Website' button in the Build panel in RStudio again OR I upload to Netlify, for these two themes, my website is rendered with all styling and images removed; black text - bolded and sized - and with a plain white background. With "gcushen/hugo-academic" the colours appear but the images are missing. Nothing appears different with the "road2stat/hugo-tanka".
I would understand this behaviour with the vanilla theme but "simple-a" and "hugo-academic" are mentioned in the blogdown book in chapter 1.6
I am using Hugo 0.53 and blogdown_0.10.1
Build Website is not for rendering the blogdown website, What it does is to render multiple Rmarkdown documents into a website.
You should use Addins -> Serve Site or call the command blogdown::serve_site() instead.
For more information on the difference between rmarkdown::render_site() and blogdown, you can read
help("render_site", package="rmarkdown") and
The rmarkdown official manual

How to add default code snippets to blogdown posts?

I've set up my blog using blogdown.
Now I would like to define some standard code snippets that should be included in each post (e.g., for centering images). Take this R-code as an example; it should be included automatically in each post:
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
out.width = "70%",
fig.align = 'center'
)
I've read the section on templates in the blogdown book, but I could only find html based templates, which appears not so straightforward to me.
How can I add R-code snippets per default to posts using blogdown?
You can do this in .Rprofile, as explained in Section 1.4 of the blogdown book. The easiest way is probably to use an RStudio project, and create a .Rprofile file in the root directory of the website project, in which you set the knitr global chunk options.

sharing gitbook using `bookdown` package in `R` - other users do see all the chapters

I have a gitbook generated from the bookdown package in R, but I am not able to share the book with collaborators efficiently.
The problem is that if I send them the html generated as a gitbook, the front page (first chapter) shows up fine, but none of the links to other chapters work. The reason I believe is that the book is looking for html files for other chapters in the location in which clicking on other chapters were created even if I place the individual chapter html in the same folder as the main file.
My question is - how can I efficiently share the gitbook and make sure that the links work if all the chapter files are in the same folder.
Thanks!
SN

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