All things META

The story of my website

I have had a website here for the past 10+ years. The main purpose was to have it for my personal email address, and when i set it up, I integrated it into the beta Google Apps for Business program, (which has long been renamed google suite [Thankfully, I was grandfathered in with a free account.]) Back in the day, I was really interested in web design and I helped a few non-profits design their own websites. When I was a student at Clemson University, even hired me to build a website for a TEDx talk we did. While building websites can be easy, I find that maintaining them is the hard work. Or tweaking them for clients’ new use cases. That’s probably why I’m not in the website development business (anymore). Anyway, I have had this domain sitting around with a static skeleton page up for quite some time.

At the most recent (2018) RStudio Conference, I heard Yihui give a talk about blogdown, and I was motivated to learn how to create an awesome website using the blogdown package, but I didn’t really followthrough. It’s been more of a nice to have that I didn’t have time for, especially since I was trying to refine other areas of my R skills at the time. I never really wanted to pay for hosting for my personal website, so over the years, I mostly used 000webhost.com until they stopped supporting free domain name integration, and hostinger.com, until they booted all the free accounts. Just last month I got a warning that the page I had up would finally be taken down.

Last night, while I was on twitter, Emily Robinson threw some inspiration my way:

I read the great post Emily mentioned by @drob , and decided to give it a go. One of the reasons I love the data science community is this impression that data scientists are open people who care and want to help each other. Internally at CARFAX, this is true, and we have #r_users and #r_nerds slack channels for questions and knowledge-sharing. (This is not to say that other disciplines at CARFAX don’t share an open, friendly, helpful attitude… they do. It’s one of the hallmarks of working here, and abiding by our “playbook”.)

So, while a lot of my day to day work entails private information (like evaluating data sources from potential partners, or working with other proprietary data), and I can’t hope to share all the cool visualizations or dashboards we make using R, I can share tips, new things that I have learned, and other useful and fun topics as they come along.

So I put this together today with a couple hours of work. If you’re interested, here are some links for resources:

1. the Rstudio webinar (a talk by Yihui)
2. the blogdown book

Thanks for reading!