No Need to Over-Think This
Simply Starting
By Kristina Becvar in Blog Building R
May 23, 2022
It can feel like a huge, looming weight to create a new online space and it’s easy to procrastinate getting started.
Sometimes the best way to learn is to share what you know with someone else who knows as much or more than you do. This is what happened when I shared my shell of a blog in process with the fabulous Isha Mahajan. Really, starting to use the Hugo/Netlify/RStudio blog process is pretty simple.
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Fork theme into your Github repository ( https://github.com/hugo-apero/hugo-apero-docs for this theme)
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Create a Netlify account
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Connect your Netlify account to the blog repository in Github
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Clone your repository and open a new project in RStudio for it (be sure you’ve installed the blogdown package and Hugo in RStudio: https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown)
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Read the documentation and resources available, mess around, and build a cool blog. Connect it to your custom domain in Netlify if you’d like!
There is more to it, of course, and the wheel was already invented and documented well by the theme creators, here: https://hugo-apero-docs.netlify.app/start/setup/
Resources
Theme Documentation
This theme has tremendous support and documentation directly: https://hugo-apero-docs.netlify.app/
Introduce Yourself Online
This guide from a workshop by RStudio gives a ton of tools I’ve used in creating this site: https://iyo-rstudio-global.netlify.app/
Dr. Allison Hill
This is a great YouTube resource by Dr. Allison Hill, the creator of this theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RksaNh5Ywbo
Dr. Hill is also a co-developer of many data gems, including distill ( https://rstudio.github.io/distill/), and blogdown ( https://pkgs.rstudio.com/blogdown) R packages, and co-author of the book blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown ( https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/), which have all been super helpful in my RStudio/Blog journey.
Garrick Denbue
This was helpful for a quick reference on the netlify-blogdown workflow, and his blog has a lot of other gems as well:
https://www.garrickadenbuie.com/blog/blogdown-netlify-new-post-workflow/#netlify-toml
Markdown Tutorial