Prompt:
GitHub is an incredibly useful tool for project management and collaboration. It also has several useful features for professional promotion: you can host your own site on github using GitHub pages, describe yourself using a GitHub developer profile, and even use resume.github.io to generate a resume summary of your activity on GitHub (you must opt-in by starring the project page).
posit and the associated package infrastructure provide multiple ways to generate websites using Quarto (or Rmarkdown). You can complete this assignment using one of the two options detailed in Prompt 8
Describe your experience creating your website below. Don’t forget to link to your website! Push this blog post to your blog-8 repo. Make sure that all of the checks are passing.
How did building your own website go?
I genuinely found this activity to be very exciting. I have always wanted to have my own website but I have never fully understood all of the behind the scenes type work that has to go into it. I also thought that in order to have a website that I would have to pay for a domain name or pay for the service of hosting the website. Blog 8 gave me the information needed to begin to develop my own website. I was able to use the Quarto documents online to help guide me through the process of hosting a website, some of the modifications I could make to my website, and connecting the Quarto project to GitHub pages. It was all a very easy process.
I also took to the Quarto Gallery to see some example websites. From these examples, I was able to identify some of the structure that I was looking to incorporate into my website. I also modified some of the color of my page using a .scss file. I’m not certain if I used that file correctly or not because according to GitHub, 98% of my website is coded in SCSS. I’m still learning more about the different styling and language of HTML and CSS, so maybe in the future I can modify those files better than incorporating the SCSS file. Maybe it doesn’t matter either way, but I’m hoping to learn more about the styling.
Overall, I was impressed with the ease of use of creating the website. There are many different ways to modify the website and make it unique to each use case that a user might have. I think it also has a nice standard format that makes it consistent. I imagine it is easy to really add even more customization into the website beyond my current knowledge of the system. Some goals I have for my website would be to include an additional section for potentially a blog, an area for packages or other relevant things related to my research, and adjusting the styling and being more creative with that. I also aim to incorporate different pictures into the website or a page showcasing tweets or retweets of mine (I am working on being active on academic twitter).