OK, this is easy. Just create a new empty RStudio project.

Some years ago, GitHub started offering a free website-hosting service, perfectly integrated with its Git repository hosting service. This service is named GitHub Pages and has got its own website at https://pages.github.com.

For our purpose, we just have to create an empty repository (don’t worry, we are going to fill it later) that has the same name as your GitHub user account, for instance, andreacirilloac/github.io.

Navigate to the following link (assuming you are already logged in to GitHub) to create a new repository, github.com/new:

RStudio comes with a proper menu control to open a shell/terminal session. Just go and hit it:

You now need to remotely authenticate to GitHub from your remote desktop, run the following command to accomplish this task (substituting andreacirilloac with your GitHub account name):

git config --global user.name “AndreaCirilloAC”

In your online repository, you will find the URL of your repository. Just go and copy it while I wait for you here:

Now you can make a copy of your online repository on your local machine, that is, you can clone your repository, paste the previously copied HTTPS address in the following command, and run it on the shell/terminal session:

git clone https://github.com/AndreaCirilloAC/andreacirilloac.github.io.git

The people at RStudio provided a website template to help us get started with this really nice way of blogging. Taking advantage of their kindness just requires us to download the template using wget within our terminal/shell session:

wget /rstudio/rmarkdown-website/raw/master/_navbar.html

This will add the template to our current directory, which is also our RStudio project directory.

.gitignore files are used to let the Git system know which files shouldn’t be tracked within Git.

We can specify within this file whatever we want. However, I would recommend that you add your .rproj file by writing your_rstudio_project_name.rproj within your .gitignore file, which should be placed within the RStudio project.

makefile is a file used during website building, containing relevant metadata such as the kind of output to produce.

We can easily download it using wget, once again due to the courtesy of the RStudio team, from https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown-website/blob/master/Makefile.

In this step, we will create a .yaml file, containing data on the output we want to produce from the Markdown code, which is, in our case, an HTML file.

Creating this file can be done using the touch command on the terminal/session if you are on a Unix OS:

touch _output.yaml

If you are on a Windows OS, you should instead use the following command:

New-Item -ItemType file output.yaml

We are now going to add content to our .yaml file by specifying the required kind of the output and other parameters.

In both Unix and Windows OS, we can do this using the echo command and the pipe operator:

echo “html_document:
> self_contained: false
> lib_dir: libs
> “ > _output.yaml

The index.rmd file will represent your blog home, so you can add to it all the content you would like to help your reader get oriented within the website.

Refer to the Using one markup language for all types of documents – rmarkdown recipe to see how to fill and style your document.

This blog usually contains an about me page to introduce the website author(s).

Push your new file to the online repository first by adding all modified files to a new commit. Then, commit and finally push from the terminal session:

git add -a
git commit
git push