Unless you set up a custom domain name (which we’ll cover in a separate post), your website’s URL will be. If you do have one, great! If you don’t already have an account, think about your username carefully. The first thing you need to do is create a GitHub account if you don’t already have one. Consequently, this tutorial will show you how to set up an academic website using Jekyll. My life might have been easier if I’d gone with Hugo and blogdown, but here we are. I chose Jekyll over Hugo because I liked the Jekyll theme better than the Hugo one. There are plenty of differences under the hood, but the most important one for building an academic website is that Hugo integrates nicely with the blogdown R package, letting you write your website entirely in R. Relevant for us is that each one has a full-featured theme for academic websites that you’ve probably seen before. Two of the most popular programs available for building static sites from Markdown files are Jekyll and Hugo. Sometimes you will also see inline code like this, and again I’ll note whether these represent code you should run, or the output of code.Ī brief aside on Git-speak: these periodic indented blocks will explain the terminology that Git uses to help you understand what each Git command actually does. I will clearly state which of these options applies in any given case. These can denote either code you should enter and run, or the output of running a command. ![]() For example, would become jayrobwilliams for me, because that is my GitHub username. Anytime you see content between two angle brackets, you should replace the content with the appropriate version for yourself. In this tutorial, I use a couple of conventions to describe computer code and the actions you’ll do with it. ![]() If you know how to use R Markdown you have all the skills you need to build a website. I’ve written this guide for people who have some experience coding, but don’t want to spend an afternoon learning two new languages on their own. The template I use contains a 6 point checklist with no illustrations or examples. There are other guides to using static site generators to make academic websites, but they all assume a very high level of experience with the required tools and the ability to conduct extensive troubleshooting on your own. I’m assuming some familiarity with using the terminal, but no experience with Git or GitHub is needed. Anyone who’s received graduate training in quantitative social science in the past few years should have all the necessary skills. This guide is intended for someone with a basic level of coding experience and comfort with Markdown files. Steven Miller has a nice rundown on all of the advantages of this approach. e.g, fill out and submit forms) it can be hosted for free with GitHub Pages. Because the resulting site is static (it’s just a collection of files with no interactivity where users can. I use a static site generator that produces HTML from easy to edit Markdown files. I take a different approach that requires some (minimal) coding experience, but produces a beautiful and professional website that is ad free. The free versions of these tools often come with ads, or at the least a message telling you which tool was used to create the website. There are plenty of guides out there on how to create a personal website using tools like WordPress, Wix, or Google Sites. Even worse, you’ll lose your search engine ranking since you’ll be starting over from square one with a new URLĮven if you stay at the same institution for the rest of your career, you’re at the mercy of IT and your site may be taken down by a change to the hosting platform at some point in the future.Even if you can export the contents of a WordPress site, there’s no guarantee it will seamlessly integrate with another university’s implementation.If (when) you move institutions, you’ll lose your website.If you’re a junior scholar, having your own personal webpage is even more important: edu URL, they have several drawbacks that have been extensively written on. While these sites are quick to set up and come with the prestige of a. ![]() Most universities these days provide a free option, usually powered by WordPress (both WashU and UNC use WordPress for their respective offerings). Obviously I agree with this since you’re reading this on my website, but if you don’t have one, you should get one. If you’re an academic, you need a website.
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