I’ve decided the time has come to restart my blog. I’ve tried blogging many times before with mixed success, and this time around I’d like to avoid the mistakes of the past. I’ve set up this blog with a few principles in mind:
Simplicity. One mistake I’ve often made is to create blogs using the fanciest tools I could find. For example, I’ve previously used Hugo based packages like blogdown and hugodown, and much as I love those tools (and use them on other sites) I want this blog to be as low-maintenance as possible. To that end I’m using distill for R markdown, and I’m keeping the default settings in most respects. (Edit: I later decided to switch to quarto!)
Encapsulation. There was a time when I really liked the idea of having my blog integrated nicely with my homepage (djnavarro.net). I’ve become less keen on this because the aesthetic and technical demands of a blog aren’t always aligned with the needs of my homepage. This time I’ve set it up so that the blog.djnavarro.net subdomain corresponds to a different repository from my homepage. I’m hoping this will make blogging simpler from a technical standpoint.
Focus. Another mistake I have made in the past is letting blogs “sprawl”, mixing personal essays with technical posts. My intention with this blog is to write technical posts only, mostly on R and data science. I’ve moved my personal writing to essays.djnavarro.net and my artwork to art.djnavarro.net. My hope is that this will make blogging easier from an emotional standpoint.
Reproducibility. A frustration I’ve had with my previous blogs is that my posts were not particularly reproducible. Source code was often missing, information about the R session was not provided, and so on. This time, I’ve set up the blog so that there is a “details” section at the bottom of each post containing links to the source code, the R session information, and a lockfile generated using
renv::snapshot().
At this stage I’m not entirely certain how I’ll use the blog. There are a lot of possibilities, and I have some thoughts on which ones I’d like to explore. A self-contained blog such as this seems nicely suited to teaching materials. An obvious example would be to write blog posts to accompany the data science slides and youtube videos I’ve been making. The lack of written material to go with those talks has bothered me for some time. Another possibility might be to write tutorials on generative art. I use my art website to post the art itself, but the site functions as a gallery rather than a classroom. I get a lot of people asking questions about how I make my art, and this blog might be a good place to provide answers. Those aren’t the only possibilities, of course, but they are appealing ones.
Not sure how this will go, but fingers crossed!
Last updated
2023-05-27 18:17:34.354031
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BibTeX citation:
@online{navarro2021,
author = {Navarro, Danielle},
title = {Welcome to the Jungle},
date = {2021-04-05},
url = {https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2021-04-05_welcome},
langid = {en}
}
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