Distilling a website

To accompany my book, I created a website using the distill package.

With David Spiegelhalter, I co-authored a book of Covid-19 statistics. For the book, I wanted to create a website hosting the graph code, reviews, and purchase links. Some elements of this site remain a work in progress.

Using R Markdown, one package and limited coding can produce a site. This site had several specifications:

• Several different pages.
• A navigation bar linking to these pages.
• The ability to host images and link to code.
• Customisation of fonts and colours.

(Image: Covid by Numbers GitHub pages site)

Creating the website

After setting up the GitHub pages site, you can create a new site in a single command:

library(distill)
create_website(dir = "my-website", title = "My Website")

That code makes three files: a home page, an ‘about’ page, and a configuration file. We should look at the configuration for the accompanying website:

name: "covid-by-numbers"
title: "Covid by Numbers"
description: |
  Covid by Numbers
output_dir: "docs"
navbar:
  logo:
    image: images/logo.png
    href: https://covid-by-numbers.github.io/
  right:
    - text: "Code"
      menu…