A note from the authors: Some of the information and instructions in this book are now out of date because of changes to Hugo and the blogdown package.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

About the Authors

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.