Migrating from ecostudies to ecodiv

web publishing
Ecostudies EOL A new solution Using blogdown Migrating old posts Ecostudies EOL I have kept a blog on Ecostudies for quite some years. It was mostly about using open source GIS tools. tags: Hugo, web publishing
Author

Paulo van Breugel

Published

June 12, 2020

Ecostudies EOL

I have kept a blog on Ecostudies for quite some years. It was mostly about using open source GIS tools. Although I enjoyed writing the posts, other things became more important, and I haven’t written a post for quite a while.

Writing teaching material is now part of my job, and writing blogs can actually be useful to keep notes of ideas or techniques I want to use in my teaching or research later on. Of course, I can (and do) use a notebook for that (the great ZIM-wiki). But I have noticed that writing a blog post forces me to write more comprehensible notes than I otherwise might do. Better to remember, or even just understand my own notes later on :-).

A new solution

Although my old Wordpress site served me well, I have decided to go for a more flexible solution, Hugo. Hugo is a very popular open-source site generators. It is, at its basics, easy to implement, and comes with tons of very nice templates. And important, it generates a static website which means the site can be hosted anywhere without requiring server-side scripts such as PHP or databases like WordPress does (see here more about the benefits of a static website).

I am using the Academic template, which makes it easy to work with different types of content, such as blog posts, publications, slides, online courses, software documentation, amongst others. Essentially, it works out of the box. And if you want to make your own modifications (like the Contents box on this page), it is easy to add those modifications on top of the theme.

Using blogdown

Because I work a lot in R/Rstudio, and already use Bookdown for creating teaching materials, using Blogdown to create my site was a no-brainer. And if your website is related to data analysis or (R) programming, you should certainly check out the site to learn more about the benefits.

Migrating old posts

To keep easier track of old, but possibly still useful posts, I’ll migrate some over to this site. But I hope to add some new content soon. Keep an eye on this space.