Rebecca Barter | Becoming an R blogger | RStudio (2020)
Blogging is an excellent way to learn, improve your communication skills, and gain exposure in the R and data science communities. In this talk, I will discuss how and why I started blogging, and why you should too. I will guide you through choosing topics, writing your blog using RStudio and blogdown, hosting it on netlify, and sharing your blog with the world. This talk is for you if you've wanted to start a blog on R, data science, or to showcase your data analyses, but don't know where to start. Materials: github https://github.com/rlbarter/rstudio-conf-2020-blogger-slides slides (pdf) https://github.com/rlbarter/rstudio-conf-2020-blogger-slides/blob/master/Becoming%20an%20R%20blogger
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi everyone, I'm super excited to be here. So this is my last slide and I'm going to go back to the beginning. So that was a quick preview of what I'm going to talk about. So I'm going to talk today about being an R blogger. So here on my first slide are many ways in which you can get in touch with me. Feel free to take a photo.
So I have a website, maybe some of you have seen it before. I write a lot of blogs about R packages, about statistics stuff, sometimes just about random opinions that no one cares about, but you know, it's fun, it's a great way to procrastinate.
Why start a blog?
I would like to talk first about, okay, if you're interested in starting a blog, what are the main reasons you might want to do that? So the first one is to learn something. You never realize how little you know until you have to explain it to someone else. Writing a blog is a great way of realizing that.
You never realize how little you know until you have to explain it to someone else.
Another reason is, this is actually one of my main motivations, which was, like, I really enjoy teaching and I wanted a series of examples of my teaching. So if you have a blog where you explain a lot of things, it shows that you know how to explain a lot of things, so that's pretty great. I also feel like it's a really great way to practice your communication skills, for which there's often not that many opportunities. You know, if you're in academia, writing scientific papers is usually a good way to practice poor communication skills.
This is my favorite, which is procrastination. So I often have those days where I just can't actually do any of the things I'm supposed to be doing, and really I just want to go home, but probably I shouldn't do that, so maybe I'll do something else that makes it feel like I'm being productive, such as write a blog post.
Choosing what to write about
Okay, so now that I've convinced you all that you want to write blog posts, how do you choose what to write about? So what I normally do is I write about something that I just learned, especially if I had a hard time learning about it. So if you are trying to learn something and there's no resources out there, that's a really, really good indication that there need to be some good resources out there. So you know, why not help everyone else not go through what you just went through?
The other is I write about things that I want to learn. So that's what I did with the Purr package, for example. I was like, I know I should know more about Purr. So I was like, I'm going to write a blog post about it, and then I learned so much, and it was great.
How to write and host a blog
Okay, so how do you write a blog? So the blogdown package is amazing. It's essentially a way of collecting together a bunch of R Markdown documents into a web page. I also host my, so I have a GitHub repository in which my public folder from the blogdown rendering exists, and if you use Netlify, you can essentially have it point to your Git repo, and then every time you push to your Git repo, it automatically updates your website. So it's very little overhead compared with something like GitHub Pages.
I also wrote a post about this like three years ago. I'll show a link to my slides at the end, so this is probably hard to see.
Okay, so you should also use relevant and interesting data. So this is a photo of an iris plant as a great example. So I also like to do something where instead of downloading, instead of having people download data and then having to load it in manually, I try to have it so that you can load it in line using a URL. So it just makes it so that it's a lot easier for your readers to follow along.
You also want to keep everything really simple, like explain it to your grandma, don't explain it to an expert. Like the people that are reading this are people that probably like need some help, and like I used to kind of preface by saying sorry if I'm giving too much detail, and people would be like that was not too much detail, that was like spot on, and that was really nice. Like I literally explained something using stick figures once, and it was great.
Getting the word out
Okay, so now you've written all this stuff, how do you get the word out there? So honestly the best way to do that is to tweet about it. I am not a big Twitter person. I think people think that I am because like when I do tweet, there's like a lot of kind of spreading, but it's like I tweet once every three months, and it's usually like hey, here's a blog post, and that's been so far the best way for kind of showing people that I've written a new blog post.
Something else that I do is I try to use easily Googleable titles. For example, Max will like this one, I have a carrot tutorial, which is if you just literally type in carrot tutorial, it's the second thing that pops up in Google, and the title is basic tutorial of carrot, like that's going to come up, which is kind of nice.
Another thing to do is to like present, you know, like go to our ladies, give a tutorial or your company or your university, and there's a lot of ways to kind of spread the things that you've learned and that you want to share and explain, and it's a really, really great way to practice.
So here's a link to my slides at the top. Go forth and blog. Thank you.
