Why I created this blog

I created this blog in 2020 as I was finishing my master’s degree. I had really enjoyed my program, particularly the data science and biostatistics courses, and wanted to maintain the momentum of continuous learning. I also wanted to get deeper with R, practice analyzing data and drawing conclusions, and think of interesting and appropriate ways to present those conclusions. I was also nervous to forget what I’d learned, and was looking for ways to practice foundational topics outside of a classroom setting. Finally, it was the beginning of the pandemic, and after having achieved a viable sourdough starter, cultivating a few houseplants, and attempting (unsuccessfully) to cut my own hair, starting a blog was the next item on the quarantine to-do list.

How I created this blog

As someone who had no experience in web development, I will admit that the learning curve was steep. I initially built this blog using Jekyll and GitHub Pages, but over time, I found the workflows to be confusing and troublesome. I was running into problems with git errors and gem file updates - things would break for reasons I couldn’t understand and sometimes couldn’t google my way out of. All of these issues were related to a mismatch between the technology and my skillset.

Ultimately, I migrated to the Hugo/blogdown/Netlify stack and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. It was admittedly a bit of a pain to migrate my files, deal with broken links, and figure out a new folder structure. But since I didn’t have a ton of content it didn’t take long at all. If you’re an R-user, and particularly if you don’t have a lot of experience coding in command line, I would highly recommend this approach.

I followed the following tutorials, and didn’t need much else.

• Yihui Xie’s incredibly newbie-friendly blogdown book
• Rebecca Barter’s excellent guide
• Antoine Soetewey’s equally excellent guide. This blog has so much great content and I’ve found it to be a useful biostats in my own work (I also co-opted the theme used on that site for this blog)

I also set up a redirect from my old Jekyll site on GitHub pages site to this one. This was pretty easy as well. I followed the guide here, but in a nutshell, I just added a redirect.html file to the _layouts folder, pasted in the provided code, and updated the YAML in my index.html (homepage) file with the redirect_to location (the URL of this site). I repeated the process for all the posts - there were not too many so this wasn’t cumbersome, but I’m sure there’s a programmatic way to do this.