In building this site I had to learn about Jekyll and Ruby from scratch, and HTML, CSS, JavaScript from not much more than scratch. I’ve drawn on all sorts of people’s contributions on the web, but here are some of the more important:
- I’ve ripped off the Cosmo Bootswatch theme and made my own small modifications. Cosmo gets all the credit, and me all the blame, for the results.
- I use the Poppins Google Font.
- The Jekyll documentation is great, as are Julian Thilo’s unofficial instructions for installing Jekyll on Windows.
- GitHub’s help on Using Jekyll with Pages was extremely helpful.
- There are at least half a dozen prominent (ie Google finds them) guides to setting up a Jekyll blog on GitHub but most of them led me down a garden path of too much complexity too soon. In the end this “complete basics” approach from the ground up proved to be what I needed. In this case, it turned out to be much easier to make one file at a time from scratch, then add in customisation and complexity, than to clone an already-built site and try to work out what it was doing.
- As in anything involving computing these days, I relied on numerous answers to old questions on stackoverflow including on navigating posts, organising posts by tag/subject and on highlighting code - at least until I moved to this method of code highlighting with CSS
- This nice straightforward Jekyll-native approach by snaptortoise to creating RSS feeds.
- As I started doing fancier things I moved to Drew Silcock’s extremely clever system of nesting to branches of the same Git repository within eachother, which lets you run more Ruby plugins. The instructions on that page don’t work with the latest version of Git but it’s easy enough to adapt. One day I’ll write an updated version.
- Adam Pritchard’s Markdown Cheatsheet is what pops up for me in Google and it is succinct, clear and to the point.
- Nothing would be as easy as it is in statistics without the numerous volunteers behind the R project.
- Interactive web apps are hosted commercially in the cloud by RStudio’s shinyapps.io platform-as-a-service, which is also what we use at my work (different account of course…). I also make extensive use of open source projects that RStudio and others too numerous to name are related with including ggvis, htmlwidgets and RStudio desktop.
- Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2, dplyr and tidyr have changed the way people think about reshaping and presenting data.