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I’ve been hyperfixating like crazy on updating my site because apparently using a data science IDE to try and make a somewhat customized site is like a puzzle to my brain?

So anyway: I used R a bit in college and got semi comfortable with it. I was interested in how it takes R markdown files and converts them to HTML with some fun built in capabilities, so I wanted to see what it would be like to make a website with this.

To be frank: I have 0 design skills and I don’t like testing on so many displays, especially since I really only have 2 devices to check on. Something that could kind of automate the responsiveness and where I could easily reuse bits of HTML with the package htmltool was appealing to me…

So here were my goals:

  1. Create a somewhat responsive site in RMarkdown with the built-in SSG editor that would also hold a lot of different media.
  2. Customize it with my own theme and CSS
  3. Use deploy to neocities to store my neocities files on Github, have more version control, and easily push updates to my site without driving myself batty.

why would you do this?

I’m not sure, honestly. I’m stubborn? I also didn’t really feel like learning an SSG just for something I do on the side as a hobby, but I plan to learn an SSG in the future. Partially I was inspired by NeoSSG which is a webring for neocities users that use static site generators.

I think my word of advice to everyone reading this is: Don’t use R if you’re going to have a lot of pages and subfolders. This killed me since I, for some reason, can’t plug in a filepath to a _site YAML on RStudio’s native markdown->HTML site generator. Also: I hate YAMLs. You guys have no idea how long it took me to get deploy-to-neocities to work on Github.

A screenshot of github action history. Most of these processes failed

Or maybe you can get an idea from this screenshot.

would you recommend doing this?

Haha. No. Unless you really like a challenge and are very comfortable with markdown in lieu of HTML: I can’t really recommend using RStudio to create a site. The average neocities user is not the target demographic, and I’m just weird. It’s intended for data scientists that just need a blog, a way to display their data, teachers who need a site for their course, and not people on the internet trying to make funny creative projects… But here are my takeaways:

Pros:

  • This works for people with stupid simple sites. So if you’re hosting everything in your root directory, this might be the solution for you.
  • Good for people that already use R, for some reason. If you’re weird and have history of working with data science it might be fine for you.
  • The plugins available in R make formatting so easy for me that I really don’t want to let go of it.

Cons:

  • RStudio’s SSG doesn’t read subdirectories, so working with most of my diary posts in a subfolder was kind of hell.
  • This is stupid difficult if you’re not familiar with YAMLs,
  • I used a lot of different R packages for this, so I don’t recommend working with it unless you’re completely fine with installing different packages (i.e. my gallery uses an R library called pixture)
  • Since I’m using deploy to neocities, I have to manually remove all of my .Rmd files to a separate folder before pushing to the site, since neocities doesn’t accept .Rmd. You can see this highly inefficient process on my github.

disclaimer: I’m stupid

My ‘journey’ with RMarkdown to build a site has been like, 4 days long counting the time I spent on my professional site. So I do not know everything. I am frankly rather stupid and that’s fine. I’m trying to learn in public. Even if I’ve embarrassed myself, at least I’ve maybe shown the starry-eyed RStudio user wanting to try to hack it for neocities that this is not a good idea. If people have feedback on R or are comfortable with using it as an SSG, I probably look like an idiot! And that’s fine. This is a learning experience for me and it’s more fun than anything else.

lessons?

I had fun brute-forcing RStudio to do what I want, but I think I’ll just be using blogdown in the future since it:

  1. Has better documentation
  2. Is more flexible since it uses Hugo which is a pretty popular SSG
  3. Supports multiple pages and subdirectories.

Personally I didn’t want to use Hugo because…it’s popular. I’m pretentious! Sue me. I might check out Distill or Quarto first, but these are both very corporate and very catered to data scientists and professionals… I might like to call myself a data scientist, but this site is not for those projects!

(Well, maybe I’ll have some fun with it in the future?)

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