Earlier this week I gave a talk and used this picture to compare myself last summer to this spring. Some key differences. Last summer I was: clean shaven provoking bears This spring I am: sporting a quarantine beard dealing with sassy autofill Despite what autofill was suggesting I think there’s some reason for optimism, though no doubt recent weeks have been tough. Last summer, when I took the photo with the bears, I was up in New York City.
This could have been a tweet. Sometimes it is a tweet. After I have taken a break from social media, blogging, etc and I try to get back in the swing I find it incredibly difficult to get restarted. I feel enormous pressure to say something insightful, something funny, something grand. An effective strategy is not to shoot for the stars. Rather than writing something great, I set my sights lower.
I decided to switch over my blog theme. The Ghostwriter theme I used was nice, but it didn’t have a blog archive. As the number of posts grow a blog archive is easier to search. We still have tags you can search. I’ve adopted the Hugo Blackburn theme. This is the same theme used over at the Simply Statistics blog. If you drop by that blog, check out this essay by Roger Peng with some perspective on the evolution of R.
LET’S MAKE SHARING BETTER ON THIS PAGE. I saw this today: 💫 how-to for making your #blogdown social-friendly: "Socialize your blogdown" by @xvrdm https://t.co/RurfUvRf6X #rstats #opengraph pic.twitter.com/HY0Id0V7Yk — Mara Averick (@dataandme) October 23, 2017 That links to this excellent post on socializing your blogdown. Turns out my (slightly) modified GhostWriter theme is mostly setup for this already. I just needed to add a description and twitterImg to the post metadata and it works.
ALL RIGHT! LOOKS LIKE WE’RE BACK ONLINE. I took the opportunity to try out the newly released blogdown R package and migrate my blog over from Jekyll to Hugo. This blog has been up for just over two years and Jekyll was working fine, but I never felt really comfortable. I’m guessing that the Blogdown package will become enormously popular and it seems that Hugo has more flexibility for me.