Setup Post

github pages guide

I started with the guide here: https://pages.github.com/

Here are some things that are important for each post…

<!-- ## Name of the file  -->

<!-- The rmarkdown file must be named "YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.Rmd". Github pages will automatically title the post "name of post" (with the dashes replaced by spaces). The file name doesn't need to be capitalized, jekyll will capitalize the post title automatically.  -->

File organization

There are three important pieces to get blog posts from Rstudio to github pages: the rmarkdown file must be located in the docs folder, it must create a markdown file in the _portfolio folder and save images in the docs/assets folder.

Rmarkdown file

When making a new blog post, I edit the code, text and figures in an rmarkdown file (.rmd). I save the .rmd file in the docs folder.

Markdown file

In the .rmd file header, I specify

output: 
  md_document:
    variant: markdown+backtick_code_blocks
    preserve_yaml: TRUE
knit: (function(inputFile, encoding) {
      out_dir <- "_portfolio";
      rmarkdown::render(inputFile,
                        encoding=encoding,
                        output_dir=file.path(dirname(inputFile), out_dir))})
title: Setup Post

This ensures a few things: 1. the output is a markdown file (.md) which works with github pages 2. the code blocks are recognized when there are three backticks before and after the blocks 2. the front matter in the .rmd is preserved in the .md file 3. the .md file is saved in the _portfolio directory folder (which is where pages looks when it is processing posts) 4. the title is needed and is used as the link from the main page

Images

To process images, all images need to be saved to the assets folder, which is located within the docs folder. I do this with an r code block right below the header with the following:

knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.path ="/assets/")

Had some issues with figures

This post solved my issues: http://www.randigriffin.com/2017/04/25/how-to-knit-for-mysite.html

I had to change the figure option to this:

knitr::opts_knit$set(base.dir = "~/gannawag.github.io/docs/", base.url = "/")
knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.path = "assets/")

Need to be sure we are populating the correct assets folder (should be in the project directory).

Including Plots Example to make sure it works

Github

Commit only the .md and the assets folder (not the .Rmd file).

I also needed to change a few settings in the config.yml file, the index.html and the _portfolio pages folder.