My personal site is built using Blogdown, a simple RStats package that uses the Hugo framework to create HTML for static websites. The website itself is hosted for free through Github Pages.

using Blogdown is a very simple and user friendly way of creating a static website, and it’s open source and free. My workflow for a new blogpost is to open the underlying RStudio project for the site, run blogdown::new_post(), and write the new post in RMarkdown. I then run blogdown::build_site(), which generates the HTML files automatically, and I push these to the Github repo. The website is served automatically (for free) by Github Pages.

I followed the ‘Creating Websites with R Markdown’ book by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas and Alison Presmanes Hill. Some of the material is slightly outdated (as they note), but a close read and some tinkering will get you most of the way there. Building such a site is a great exercise in realising how much is possible with simple modern tools.