A note from the authors: Some of the information and instructions in this book are now out of date because of changes to Hugo and the blogdown package. If you have suggestions for improving this book, please file an issue in our GitHub repository. Thanks for your patience while we work to update the book, and please stay tuned for the revised version!

In the meantime, you can find an introduction to the changes and new features in the v1.0 release blog post and this "Up & running with blogdown in 2021" blog post.

— Yihui, Amber, & Alison

Acknowledgments

Originally I planned to write only one sentence in this section: “I thank Tareef.” This book and the blogdown package would not have been finished without Tareef, the president of RStudio. He has been “gently nudging” me every week since Day 1 of blogdown. As a person without strong self-discipline and working remotely, I benefited a lot from weekly meetings with him. He also gave me a lot of good technical suggestions on improving the package. Actually, he was one of the very earliest users of blogdown.

Of course, I’d like to thank RStudio for the wonderful opportunity to work on this new project. I was even more excited about blogdown than bookdown (my previous project). I started blogging 12 years ago, and have used and quit several tools for building websites. Finally I feel satisfied with my own dog food.

Many users have provided helpful feedback and bug reports through GitHub issues (https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues). Two of my favorites are https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues/40 and https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues/97. Some users have also contributed code and improved this book through pull requests (https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/pulls). You can find the list of contributors at https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/graphs/contributors. Many users followed my suggestion to ask questions on StackOverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/tags/blogdown) instead of using GitHub issues or Emails. I appreciate all your help, patience, and understanding. I also want to make special mention of my little friend Jerry Han, who was probably the youngest blogdown user.

For this book, I was fortunate enough to work with my co-authors Amber and Alison, who are exceptionally good at explaining things to beginners. That is the ability I desire most. Needless to say, they have made this book friendlier to beginners. In addition, Sharon Machlis contributed some advice on search engine optimization in this book (https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues/193). Raniere Silva contributed Section 3.4 (https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/pull/225).

I’d like to thank all Hugo authors and contributors (Bjørn Erik Pedersen and Steve Francia et al.) for such a powerful static site generator. At least it made me enjoy building static websites and blogging again.

For some reason, a part of the R community started to adopt the “sticker-driven development” model when developing packages. I was hoping blogdown could have a hexbin sticker, too, so I asked for help on Twitter (https://twitter.com/xieyihui/status/907269861574930432) and got tons of draft logos. In particular, I want to thank Thomas Lin Pedersen for his hard work on a very clever design. The final version of the logo was provided by Taras Kaduk and Angelina Kaduk, and I truly appreciate it.

This is the third book I have published with my editor at Chapman & Hall/CRC, John Kimmel. I always love working with him. Rebecca Condit and Suzanne Lassandro proofread the manuscript, and I learned a lot from their comments and professional suggestions.

Yihui Xie
Elkhorn, Nebraska