Making a personal (academic) website using Blogdown

May 31, 2020 · 2 min read

Here, I used instructions from 2 different sources, 1) the blogdown website and 2) the documentation for the Hugo Academic theme. First install the Blogdown package in R:

library(blogdown)

Navigate to the directory where your website files will reside on your computer,

setwd("/path/to/parent/folder")

then run the following:

blogdown::install_hugo(version = "0.69.2", force = TRUE) # the specific version is important, Academic doesn't work with the latest Hugo version
blogdown::new_site(install_hugo = FALSE, theme = 'gcushen/hugo-academic')

Now edit the contents of the file content/authors/admin/_index.md

Start a new repository for your website on GitHub.

Install git on your computer.

git init
git add *.*
git commit -m 'new website'
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/blogdown_website.git
git push -u origin master

Install miniconda3 and create a new conda environment

conda create -n personal_website
conda activate personal_website
conda install -c conda-forge academic

Publications

Navigate to the website root folder

cd /path/to/parent/folder/mywebsite

and use the academic conda package to convert the .bib file into markdown documents

academic import --bibtex ~/Downloads/My\ publications.bib

Deployment

Open a new account, if you don’t have one already, on Netlify. Click on Sites > New site from Git, choose GitHub under Continuous Deployment and give permissions as needed. Then click on Sites > your site > Settings > General > Change site name, to change the site address.

That’s it, now everytime you push a new commit to GitHub, the site is automatically deployed to Netlify!

Tutorial Hugo R Blogdown
Authors
Dr. Srinivasa Rao
Senior Researcher in Cancer Genomics
I graduated with a degree in clinical medicine at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, India. Following this, I obtained a Master of Science (by research) degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras; my research during this period focused on the role of microRNAs in the regulation of the Wnt signalling pathway. I studied for DPhil at the University of Oxford (2010-2014), in the Bone Oncology group headed by Dr. Claire Edwards. In my postdoctoral work, I worked on varied projects including high throughput screening, image and video analysis, and genomic analysis of prostate cancers. My recent work has been focused on studying tumour evolution and intra-tumour heterogeneity in prostate cancer, using spatial-omics tools developed by my group as well as the wider community. In addition to genomic analysis, we leverage foundation pathology models and spatial data frameworks developed by the community to develop a multi-modal understanding of prostate tumour biology.