In rstudio/blogdown: Create Blogs and Websites with R Markdown

About the Authors {#author .unnumbered}

Yihui is the main developer of the blogdown package. He did not start working on the systematic documentation (i.e., this book) until four months after he started the blogdown project. One day, he found a very nice blogdown tutorial on Twitter written by Amber Thomas. Being surprised that she could create a great personal website using blogdown and write a tutorial when there was no official documentation, Yihui immediately invited her to join him to write this book, although they had never met each other before. This definitely would not have happened if Amber did not have a website. By the way, Amber asked the very first question with the blogdown tag on StackOverflow.

About half a year later, Yihui noticed another very well-written blogdown tutorial by Alison on her personal website, when this book was still not complete. The same story happened, and Alison became the third author of this book. The three authors have never met each other.

Hopefully, you can better see why you should have a website now.

Yihui Xie {-}

Yihui Xie (https://yihui.org) is a software engineer at Posit Software, PBC (https://www.posit.co). He earned his PhD from the Department of Statistics, Iowa State University. He is interested in interactive statistical graphics and statistical computing. As an active R user, he has authored several R packages, such as knitr, bookdown, blogdown, xaringan, animation, DT, tufte, formatR, fun, mime, highr, servr, and Rd2roxygen, among which the animation package won the 2009 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award (ASA). He also co-authored a few other R packages, including shiny, rmarkdown, and leaflet.

In 2006, he founded the Capital of Statistics (https://cosx.org), which has grown into a large online community on statistics in China. He initiated the Chinese R conference in 2008, and has been involved in organizing R conferences in China since then. During his PhD training at Iowa State University, he won the Vince Sposito Statistical Computing Award (2011) and the Snedecor Award (2012) in the Department of Statistics.

He occasionally rants on Twitter (https://twitter.com/xieyihui), and most of the time you can find him on GitHub (https://github.com/yihui).

He enjoys spicy food as much as classical Chinese literature.

Amber Thomas {-}

Amber Thomas (https://amber.rbind.io) is a data journalist and "maker" at the online publication of visual essays: The Pudding (https://pudding.cool). Her educational background, however, was in quite a different field altogether: marine biology. She has a bachelor's degree in marine biology and chemistry from Roger Williams University and a master's degree in marine sciences from the University of New England. Throughout her academic and professional career as a marine biologist, she realized that she had a love of data analysis, visualization, and storytelling and thus, she switched career paths to something a bit more data focused.

While looking for work, she began conducting personal projects to expand her knowledge of R's inner workings. She decided to put all of her projects in a single place online (so that she could be discovered, naturally) and after lots of searching, she stumbled upon an early release of the blogdown package. She was hooked right away and spent a few days setting up her personal website and writing a tutorial on how she did it. You can find that tutorial and some of her other projects and musings on her blogdown site.

When she is not crunching numbers and trying to stay on top of her email inbox, Amber is usually getting some fresh Seattle air or cuddling with her dog, Sherlock. If you are looking for her in the digital world, try https://twitter.com/ProQuesAsker.

Alison Presmanes Hill {-}

Alison (https://alison.rbind.io) is a professor of pediatrics at Oregon Health and Science University's (OHSU) Center for Spoken Language Understanding in Portland, Oregon. Alison earned her PhD in developmental psychology with a concentration in quantitative methods from Vanderbilt University in 2008. Her current research focuses on developing better outcome measures to evaluate the impact of new treatments for children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, using natural language processing and other computational methods. Alison is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute, and Autism Speaks.

In addition to research, Alison teaches graduate-level courses in OHSU's Computer Science program (https://www.ohsu.edu/csee) on statistics, data science, and data visualization using R. She has also developed and led several R workshops and smaller team-based training sessions, and loves to train new "useRs." You can find some of her workshop and teaching materials on GitHub (https://github.com/apreshill) and, of course, on her blogdown site.

Being a new mom, Alison's current favorite books are The Circus Ship and Bats at the Ballgame. She also does rousing renditions of most Emily Arrow songs (for private audiences only).

rstudio/blogdown documentation built on Feb. 5, 2024, 10:09 p.m.