Here I want to discuss my transition from Pelican to Blogdown and present some personal learnings. In June 2017 I decided to build a personal website/portafolio. I chose Pelican, because:
It is written in Python, which was the programing language I was mainly working on.
I wanted to include some Jupyter notebook I had already written.
A great post: Building a data science portfolio: Making a data science blog explaining the procedure and using GitHub Pages to publist it.
Overall, it was easy getting started. Nevertheless, I encounter the following challenges with the Alchemy template:
Including Jupyter notebooks: I had some guidance by Dror Atariah (go and check his nice blog!). I must admit that the integration of the liquid_tags plugin was somehow tricky. I had to include a
_nb_header.htmlfile.It was not straight forward to enable Mathjax. I had to include it myself following this repository.
I also wanted to include R notebooks. This was not straightforward. An initial attempt was following the ideas of this post using the
rmd_readerplugin, which needs rpy2 to work. The problem ist that this module is not available anymore for Python 3.X. As a work around, I found a post where an R function is provided in order to render R Notebooks into Pelican format.
Why did I decide to move to blogdown?
Last week I attended an R-Users meetup in Berlin where one of the talks was about: Code-centric websites with Blogdown. I has a quite interesting introduction to Blogdown. Yo can find the content here. I decided to give it a go and within 2 days I was able to move, format and render all my posts! Here are some nice features which made me choose Blogdown:
Everithing can be donde inside RStudio.
Easy integration of R and Jupyter notebooks as well (see this post). One can directly convert a Jupyter notebook to markdown by running the command
jupyter nbconvert --to markdown my_notebook.ipynbGreat documentation.
Good integration with GitHub Pages.
Easy to use Google Analytics.
Here is a post on how include Font Awesome icons.