https://www.rostrum.blog/categories/blog-meta/ Recent content in Blog Meta on rostrum.blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Sun, 07 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2023/05/07/bd2q/ Sun, 07 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2023/05/07/bd2q/ gRaPhIc DeSiGn Is My PaSsIoN. tl;dr I’ve written a quick R package, {bd2q}, to help me convert my {blogdown} blog to Quarto. Whether I’ll actually complete the conversion is another story. Upside blogdown It is destiny: no-one is ever completely happy with their blog. This site was built five years ago1 with {blogdown}, which lets you write R Markdown files and have them knitted into a blog. I ignored the newer {distill} package2, but Quarto may be worth the switch. https://www.rostrum.blog/2022/03/15/renv-profiles/ Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2022/03/15/renv-profiles/ tl;dr I think you can use the {renv} package to create separate reproducible environment profiles for each of your {distill} blog posts. Profiled Functionality comes and goes in R packages. How do you deal with that in the context of a blog built with R? What if you need to go back and change something in a post from four years ago?1 I built a demo {distill} blog to test whether the {renv} package might be a viable solution for reproducibility on a post-by-post basis. https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/09/16/goatcounter-blogdown/ Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/09/16/goatcounter-blogdown/ mudasir.jpg tl;dr This blog now uses GoatCounter instead of Google Analytics. GoatCounter is a lightweight and unobtrusive site-visit counter made by developer Martin Tournoij. Do blogposts dream of electric goats? I write posts on this blog for me and for other learners. It’s great if people find the content useful or interesting. But I don’t and never will make money from this site, so why would I care how many visits it gets? https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/05/08/readme-badge/ Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/05/08/readme-badge/ {badgr} is definitely a bodge (CBeebies via Giphy) ℹ️ Note Somehow I missed the existence of the {badger} package by Guangchuang Yu. It contains functions for several pre-baked badge types, plus badge_custom(). Download it from CRAN. tl;dr Sometimes a post on this blog is related to some code in a GitHub repository. I wanted to create a badge to link from that repo to the relevant post. https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/02/27/get-blogging/ Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2020/02/27/get-blogging/ I’m pretty sure that {blogdown} is a bit easier than {printingpressdown} (Public Domain) tl;dr There are many reasons to start that R blog you’ve been thinking about. First and foremost, do it for you. Why blog? I’ve stumbled into writing 50 posts on this blog. There was no plan. I have no strategy. It’s working so far. My only regret was not starting sooner. How would I convince me-from-the-past? https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/09/06/lithium-metadata/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/09/06/lithium-metadata/ Modifying lithium metal with heat (via Giphy) tl;dr Add author name, categories and tags to the posts of your Lithium-themed {blogdown} site. Might work for other themes. Lithium This blog is generated using Yihui Xie’s {blogdown}, which is built on the Hugo framework. A number of site-wide themes have been ported for use with {blogdown}. This site uses the clean and simple Lithium theme by Jonathan Rutheiser, modified for {blogdown} by Yihui. https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/04/14/one-year/ Sun, 14 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2019/04/14/one-year/ Happy first birthday 🎉 One year, visualised There’s been 27 posts on rostrum.blog in its first year, so about one every two weeks. This interactive graphic shows the publishing frequency, where each dot is a post and the x-axis is time. Turn your mobile to landscape mode to see it in full. {"x":{"data":[{"x":[17635,17648,17663,17670,17676,17687,17708,17712,17724,17729,17738,17786,17798,17817,17839,17856,17860,17864,17889,17900,17914,17928,17941,17954,17959,17973,17993],"y":[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],"text":["publish_date: 2018-04-14 title: R Trek: exploring stardates","publish_date: 2018-04-27 title: TWO DOGS IN TOILET ELDERLY LADY INVOLVED" https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/11/29/fontface-lithium/ Thu, 29 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/11/29/fontface-lithium/ Lithium by Nirvana (via Giphy) tl;dr Want to change the font for your {blogdown} site? I’ve been using this workflow: Find a font on the Google Fonts site Search for the font name on the independent Google Web Fonts Helper Download the zip file from the Helper, then copy all the files to static/fonts/ folder Copy the CSS from the Helper into your static/css/fonts.css file Not my type You can change the default font face for your {blogdown} blog with freely-available files from Google Fonts. https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/07/12/accessible-accessibility/ Thu, 12 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.rostrum.blog/2018/07/12/accessible-accessibility/ The accessibility empathy lab at the Government Digital Services building Digital accessibility I wrote about an accessibility workshop at the recent Sprint 18 conference. I’ve since been to a more in-depth workshop with Government Digital Service (GDS), who have just launched the latest version of their ‘testing for accessibility’ guidance in the Service Manual and also the GOV.UK Design System, which contains reusable GOV.UK styles, patterns and components with accessibility in mind.