Make your website with R Markdown in minutes

This is a template (and tutorial) for creating your website with R Markdown in minutes.

The official document from RStudio can be found here.

Procedure

Prerequisites

• Make sure that you have the latest versions of R, RStudio and package rmarkdown. I had problems of encoding because of that.
• Make sure that you have enabled Git in RStudio. More information can be found there.
• You need a GitHub account.

Make the first version of your website

• Fork this repo (use the green button "Clone" and make sure you use SSH, not HTTPS) and rename it to be 'YOURGITHUB.github.io' (in Settings of your brand new repo).
• Get the link from cloning the repo. Then, go to RStudio, create a New Project > Version Control > Git and copy this link. You have cloned your new repo as an R project.
• Use rmarkdown::render_site(encoding = "UTF-8") in the console.
• Commit and push everything from RStudio.
• Go see your new website at https://YOURGITHUB.github.io/.

Change the content of your website

• Modify _site.yml, index.Rmd, about.Rmd, cv.Rmd and CV.pdf with your own content.
• Use rmarkdown::render_site(encoding = "UTF-8") again. At any moment, you can preview your website locally, by rendering your site and viewing any of your local html file in your Web Browser.
• Commit and push everything from RStudio.
• Go see your new website with your own content at https://YOURGITHUB.github.io/.

The blog part

For now, the 'Blog' link is giving a 404 page.

If you want to add a static blog to your webpage, go there.

Two examples

You can see for example

• my own website,
• the website of the R user group in Grenoble.

Conclusion

As a reminder, all credit goes to the geniuses at RStudio (thanks also to GitHub pages). I just made some minor modifications and made a tuto about how to use all this together.

If anything is false or not clear enough, feel free to contact me or open an issue. If it is an issue only related with R Markdown, you'll find a better answer posting there.