Mid-Term Module Evaluation

• Whilst we wait to begin, please complete our mid-term module evaluation for Discovering Statistics through this link, or the QR code:

• Across all modules we typically get really low response rates for these evaluations, and we know small sample sizes are not representative! So PLEASE do complete this

• These evaluations help us to see what we're doing well and what we could improve on, they're super helpful for us to tweak anything in the rest of the module and for next years group of students, and are also very important to us for career progression!

• One of our students is also applying for funding for students to attend conferences for free (the final question), so we need a large number of responses for her to have reliable, representative data!

Intro

• I personally LOVE creating non-statistical things in R

• There's various packages and tools that are relatively straightforward to use:

  • I use the distill package to build all my websites

  • All my slides are made with xaringan, and my apps are made with shiny

  • My published papers are all made with papaja (and so was my PhD thesis!)

• & the process of making them is so much fun (I'm being SO serious!!)

• So today we're going to walk through creating your own blog-style website using Quarto!

• A blog is a website with a specific structure/look, where you have 'posts' listed on the homepage - but it doesn't have to be something you share with others to read!

• One of the most useful things about using a blog structure is that you can tag any of your 'posts' with keywords to make it easier to find the topics you want to review, and you can easily search their content too!

• I've already created a template for you to use on the Posit Cloud in the Week 05 Skills Lab project, so let's take a quick look by opening then rendering the site!

Rendering

• You can use the Render Website button in the Build tab in the top right pane to build your site

• You can also render an individual post by using Render just like you would any other Quarto doc

  • The entire website is just a bunch of Quarto docs with some extra settings to make it look like a blog!

• As a tip, if you run into any rendering problems when doing the entire site, try rendering each post separately to see if you can spot any issues/errors with them

The Setup

• The project has the following structure:

  • _quarto.yml - Quarto project file

  • index.qmd - the home page

  • about.qmd - the 'about' page

  • posts/ - the directory containing posts (i.e., your docs!)

  • posts/_metadata.yml - shared options for posts (can be ignored)

  • styles.css custom CSS for website

  • images, data, and docs folders

Top Tips!

• Make small changes & re-render the site each time

  • This way you can work out what different features actually do

  • & you can debug errors easily when you know what you've just changed (Ctrl + Z is your friend!)

• If you have errors rendering your entire site, try rendering each 'post'

• Google styling and design questions - W3Schools is a great resource for CSS and HTML

• Use Inspect Element to help identify specific components of a webpage

• The YML/YAML is very fussy when it comes to spacing/indentation so watch out when making edits!

That's all - happy building!