This website was created following twitter buzz about academics needing websites. The process was quite simple, using RStudio, the blogdown, package and hugo_academic theme, following the excellent twittorial of Dan Quintana.
The project you start with is well-structured and well-commented; just replace the dummy information with your content. The different widgets can be turned on and off or resorted (hint the weight parameter handles that). As an additional resource, I used Alison Presmanes Hill’s guide Up and running with blogdown, which suggests using the RStudio addin Serve Site enabling live refresh of the site everytime you save.If you’re an academic you need a website so that people can easily find info about your research and publications. Here’s how to make your own website for free in an under an hour using the blogdown package in #Rstats [THREAD] pic.twitter.com/9Lmo00Gkf0
— Dan Quintana (@dsquintana) May 7, 2018
Importantly, the Publications page was generated from a bibtex file exported from Mendeley, following the instructions on a blog post by Lorenzo Busetto. However, the provided script did not run properly until I (search and) replaced document_type with bibtype. The Publications list is still not perfect, as there some are spurious braces and using abstract=TRUE seemed to fail (possibly due to special characters), but it still beats generating it by hand. I used sed in the Terminal to get rid of the spurious braces in the generated markdown files. Finally, I changed the title of the Selected Publications widget to Preprints, although one should probably add an extra widget for that.
A potentially important gotcha: building the site (blogdown::build_site()) does not delete previously generated files, so sometimes out-of-date files linger. It seems fine, or even best?, to just nuke the public folder every time before you build.
A few additional resources that may be useful:
