Publish Now!

Session 3: Producing and Publishing Websites

Cynthia Huang

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Publish Now!

Our Turn: Drag & Drop

Forget GitHub Pages, I was too ambitious. . . .

Let’s Drag and Drop our docs or _site folder instead!

🔗 Netlify Drop

Netlify Drop

Pros

• Easy and straight forward
• So so quick!
• Free!

Cons

• Link expires in 24 hours if you don’t sign up
• Updating has to be done manually
• No version control

See also: Section 6.2 of Authoring Books with R Markdown

Alternative Methods

🔗 quarto.org/docs/publishing/

ASIDE: Revisiting Tools

Git and GitHub

• Git is version control tool that offers
  • time-travel with messages not just timestamps
  • version branching for testing new features (i.e. a new website theme)
  • file conflict resolutions
• GitHub is an online cloud-based platform for storing and sharing git repositories (i.e. projects). It also offers:
  • free publishing of websites via GitHub pages
  • project management tools like Issues, Discussions and Wikis

Operating System Issues

• On Windows Rtools is required to compile the R package tinytex for the PDF format
• An alternative to rendering PDFs locally (on your computer) is using the latex format instead and uploading the file to Overleaf
• Quarto might not have permission to create, move or delete files on cloud drives (e.g. Dropbox). This will causes rendering to fail. Move the files to a local non-cloud drive and try again.

Quarto vs. RMarkdown, Juypter Notebooks…

Why Quarto?

• it supports all the other formats you might need!
• new features are being added all the time
• upfront investment for time-savings in the long run