The Plan

If you are interested in building your own website where you can sometimes blog and link your blogs with other famous blogging sites such as R-bloggers and PYTHON-BLOGGERS, you will be very familiar with Blogdown, Hugo Themes, Github and Netlify. If you, like me, are familiar with R/RStudio and a feature in RStudio called R Markdown, which is mostly used for type-setting your code loaded works with expected outputs in file extensions like .Rmd, .md, .html, .pdf and word, then you do not have to worry about the first step. What is next, and what are those names listed in the title?

Open a Github account and create your first ripository

If you did not yet, open a GitHub account. You will then need to create your first repository and copy the link of the repository (More on this?)

GitHub is a version control hub where smart people who work for big tech companies develop software packages and it can be intimidating, but you can get through it.

Pick your Favorite Theme

For beginners, the best theme choice for the first site is probably the default one but there are more than 200 themes that you may go over and pick. You will need the name of the theme. For example, the default them is `yihui/hugo-lithium’.

Create your first website building project.

My experience is that the best instruction is given via youtube videos as opposed to written instructions that you may find by googling, unless you have time to read the book: “blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown”.

I carefully followed the steps in this youtube video, and found it helpful the first time. Problems will come when you start executing. As you try over several themes, your R crashes or freezes several times, your Git button will sometimes disappear from your Project/RStudio, just to mention a few of the problems that may try to discourage you from continuing. So, what are you going to do when these kinds of troubles with building your first website continue to surface? Quit?

There are plenty of resourses that will help you complete your website. So, as I continue to write this, I will concentrate on the problems I encountered and resolved.