I have spent the past day or so transporting my acedemic website from Wordpress to the current website, which is written using the (superb!) R package ‘blogdown’.
I made the change for a variety of reasons:
I am now able to use R for most things—analysis, simulations, writing papers using papaja and now my website—making my workflow more efficient (and high on the nerd-scale).
I could never really get my wordpress site to look sleek and professional. Using R and blogdown I was able to utilise the Hugo website templates, which look very nice. (The current versio of my website uses the Hugo Academic theme.)
As the blog is written in R and blogdown, it means that all the content & code behind it can be made freely available. You can see the Github page for the code of my website here.
The blog posts on my previous site which I enjoyed writing the most had R demonstrations in them. As blogdown uses markdown, I can now write blog posts using markdown meaning I can integrate R code into the blog post! Not just that, plots are automatically integrated into the blog! Observe thus!
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(faithfuld, aes(waiting, eruptions)) +
geom_raster(aes(fill = density)) +
scale_fill_distiller(palette = "Spectral")
What other reasons did I need?