Prework

Published

January 1, 2021

Welcome to the Introducing Yourself Online workshop! We look forward to meeting you. Before attending the workshop, please complete the following prework.

Set up RStudio Cloud

Sign up for a free RStudio Cloud account at https://rstudio.cloud/ before the workshop. I recommend logging in with an existing Google or GitHub account, if you have one (rather than creating a new account with another password you have to remember). I want you to be able to work from your own laptop in this workshop, but Cloud is an important back-up plan should you run into troubles.

Set up GitHub

We will be using GitHub in this workshop for version control and publishing. Sign up for a free GitHub.com account at https://github.com/join if you don’t already have one. Also:

Complete these installation instructions.
Test your connection between GitHub and RStudio following these steps.
NOTE: We strongly recommend that if you are not already a fluent GitHub user you choose HTTPS over SSH.

Brush up on markdown

Please complete this 10-minute interactive tutorial on Markdown.

Installations

Please bring a laptop that has the following installed:

A recent version of R (>=3.6.0), which is available for free at https://cloud.r-project.org/
A recent version of RStudio Desktop (>=1.4), available for free (RStudio Desktop Open Source License). Read up on the latest version here.
The R packages we will use, which you can install by connecting to the internet, opening RStudio, and running at the command line:
```
> install.packages(c("usethis", "remotes", "distill", 
                   "postcards", "blogdown"))
```
You’ll also need to install the development version of the rmarkdown package:
```
> remotes::install_github("rmarkdown")
```

Install Hugo

To use blogdown, please install Hugo:

> blogdown::install_hugo()

And ensure your current version is at least as high as:

> hugo_version()
[1] ‘0.79.0’

Check pandoc

The RStudio IDE bundles an updated version of pandoc- if you did install v1.4 of the IDE, you should be all set!

> rmarkdown::pandoc_version()
[1] ‘2.11.3’