Creating a website with {distill}

Useful resources for creating your first {distill} site.

Promises kept

When I launched this website, I promised two things:

1. that I wouldn’t write yet another guide to creating and publishing a website using the {distill} package for R
2. but instead share some of the existing resources that I had found useful when creating this very website – my first site ever (and, by implication, my first site created in R)

In this post I will keep the second promise.

As a general resource, The Distillery’s guide ‘Creating a Website’ contains everything you need every step of the way. Nevertheless, below I provide links to some of the other stuff that helped me.

{distill}

Distill 101

Prior to launching this site, I had no experiencing with web management and creating a site from scratch. This is one of the reasons why {distill} had such a strong appeal: it seemed like a simple and clean framework that would allow me to do everything in R.

• To get me started, I found Andreas Handel’s ‘Create a GitHub website with distill in less than 30 minutes’ incredibly helpful
• Thomas Mock’s ‘Building a blog with distill’ also provides a lot of useful tips and tricks

Customizing your theme

As someone new to CSS, one of the things that drew me towards {distill} was the fact that it’s an opinionated framework. This means that there is less customization that you can do. It also means, however, that there is less customization you have to do before you have a nice-looking site.

• The Distillery’s Showcase section is an amazing resource. There are so many cool (and cool-looking) sites on there and their open source code means that you can allow yourself to be inspired by their theme – and, more importantly, how they arrived at it!
• I still don’t really know CSS but I managed to piggyback from some great existing sites, including those of Harry Fisher, Shannon Pileggi, PhD, and Etienne Bacher

Other features

• If you want help to set up giscus, a free, open-source commenting system for blogs/websites that are built using the GitHub API, look no further than Joel Nitta’s tutorial ‘Enable giscus in Distill’
• I used Thomas Mock’s guide ‘Including and meta tagging extra content in a distill blog’, The Distillery’s guide on ‘Article Metadata’ , and this Twitter thread to help me set up and adjust the preview appearance of my site when sharing links on Twitter, GitHub etc.

Good luck!

I hope these links will prove useful in case you decide to give {distill} a chance! Also, make sure to check out The Distillery’s continuously updated Tips & Tricks site.

Enjoy coding your new website!