questions

[maelle]

Q (distill): Is there a difference between knitting and using the build tab?
Maëlle: apparently from RStudio the website gets built when one edits the site configuration, and when one knits a post. You need to knit posts; and if you edit about.Rmd you need to either knit it or re-build the website. My impression is that you need to knit with intent, but most often the build part happens magically.

Q: what is the difference (pros/cons) between hugo and distill?
Maëlle: I mentioned it a bit, distill is perfect for scientific/technical blogging but not very flexible. Hugo is very flexible which might be a curse. ;-) With Hugo you can really build any website: for this course website I mixed two Hugo themes, with a few custom layouts for instance (so even the slides used hugodown). But it requires time for learning.

Q: Is it possible to have one citation style file for all posts/folders with Hugo or does it need to be in the same folder as the post?
Maëlle: I'm exploring now. For distill apparently no rstudio/distill#82 For hugodown EDIT I had actually looked into it! r-lib/hugodown#28 So for both distill and hugodown, it's not possible yet but at least you can store .bib at the root and refer to it as ../../../refs.bib or so in your post YAML.

Q: How to limit the readership of your blog - if i want my website to only be viewable to the people in my company?
Maëlle: For WordPress websites having private posts seem to be built-in. For Hugo and distill it depends on how you deploy. I.e. from https://hugodown.r-lib.org/articles/deploy.html if you choose say Amazon S3 you could look for "Amazon S3 private website". Or you could deploy to a server that your team has?

Q: Regarding reproducibility: Do you have any thoughts on how to share your data belonging to the code in such a blogpost?
Maëlle: you could put it with your post in Hugo (in the post folder), otherwise sharing it in a GitHub repo works; but better for bigger datasets would be to use Figshare/Zenodo/etc.

Q: Using utterance.es, you have some sort of notification if someone comments on your post?
Maëlle: yes, same as other GitHub notifications (so email or web depending on your settings).

Q: Is there a way to collaborate on the same blog?
Maëlle: Yes definitely. At rOpenSci we use GitHub for that (we even have a guide, blogguide.ropensci.org), you could use GitLab too. Adding posts by pull requests is nice because of the pull requests review infrastructure. Without a git platform I think it might be less natural to edit collaboratively but you could still find an alternative workflow.

Q: Is it a good idea to use the distill format for the lab where you work instead of being a personal blog?
Maëlle: I've seen distill for groups (https://scientific-rmd-blogging.netlify.app/distill/further-resources/#websites-for-inspiration-), I think it works well for that too, if your colleagues are ok editing from R / letting you edit things.

Q: cheap hosting?

Comment: GDPR, privacy page, in Germany imprint.