When my institution discontinued support for personal FTP web space this summer, I decided to take the opportunity to learn to use the blogdown package in R (with the Hugo Academic theme and migrate my academic website to netlify.com. Mostly, it’s amazing, and I am deeply in debt to Alison Hill and the great tutorials she wrote for RStudio summer interns.
But in the early stages, I have already run into some wierd snags that I wasn’t able to solve using the Hugo documentation, especially since lots of the help assumes you are using Hugo directly and not via RStudio. (Maybe I just didn’t Google hard enough - that’s totally possible.)
Anyway, a major issue I encountered was that I was able to modify the default/template page to have a featured publication in each category (conference talks, journal articles, etc.). I was also able to personalize code from Lorenzo Busetto on R-bloggers to automatically generate .md files for each of my publications from a bibtex file.
But then the publications didn’t show up on my website – only the “Featured” publication was visible. I don’t know if it was the right solution, but I was able to kind-of solve the problem by removing the index.md file (with the info about my featured pub) and making sure each sub-directory in content/publication contained only .md files for each individual publication.
An unfortunate side-effect of this fix, though, is that the featured publications have somehow gotten detached from the featured images. Next on the to-do list is to try to figure out how to add an image to each publication…
And a little side note: WHY has everyone agreed that it’s impossible and a bad idea to be able to use italics in article titles? Clearly, they were not a biologist. It makes me shudder every time I see one of my titles with a binomial species name not in italics. But there’s a conspiracy among Zotero, Mendeley, and now Hugo Academic and none of them are on my side on this one, alas.
Oh, also I just accidentally deleted too many example blog posts, and now I’m afraid I’ll forget how the directory structure is supposed to look for images. There’s a folder with the post name, which contains an index.md file. Then there’s a gallery subdirectory with pngs or jpegs inside. The md file can be accompanied by an ipynb – here’s how or an Rmd file – just run blogdown:::new_post_addin() and select Rmd type.
