A short note to state the obvious point that I have switched from using Blogdown to Distill with postcards.
A short note to state the obvious point that I have switched from using Blogdown to Distill with postcards. Full length blog posts and lay paper summaries will now be posted to this site whilst shorter notes and informal peer reviews will continue to be published to my notes site. Over the next few weeks I plan to build out the site a little more with short summaries of my research projects (both software and analysis) to aid discovery.
Distill is a publication format for scientific and technical writing, native to the web and has become quite popular over the last few year. It is relatively simple to use and should hopefully be easier to maintain than my last blogdown site. At work I have been using Distill to power our COVID-19 surveillance site and whilst it isn’t the slickest website in the world it has been relatively easy to keep running over the last two years whilst server 500k+ users (though from the GitHub issues I could believe they all hated it).
This implementation draws heavily from the custom theme used by Miles Mcbain and from the Distillery. From a technical standpoint there is little that is particularly exciting here except potentially the use of child documents to integrate my GitHub about me page and presentation repository, and the staged deployment of the site using GitHub actions (building the site for all main branch pushes and for all PRs to the main branch and then only deploying to an orphaned gh-pages branch for main branch builds).
My old site and blog is still available at https://www.samabbott.co.uk/blogdown-site and I will be adding redirects to posts if and when people want to read them.
If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.
For attribution, please cite this work as
Abbott (2021, Nov. 10). Sam Abbott: Moving from Blogdown to Distill. Retrieved from https://samabbott.co.uk/posts/2021-11-10-blogdown-to-distill/
BibTeX citation
@misc{abbott2021moving,
author = {Abbott, Sam},
title = {Sam Abbott: Moving from Blogdown to Distill},
url = {https://samabbott.co.uk/posts/2021-11-10-blogdown-to-distill/},
year = {2021}
}