Use Gists and reprex

Twitter has been tremendously useful in my learning of #rstats, and folks in the community are incredibly friendly and helpful. So when I was starting up this blog I asked on Twitter for advice on how to make posts reproducible:

#rstats bloggers, I've a question!
if you use GitHub pages for your blog & plan for each post / #dataviz to be a reproducible self-contained .RProj do you have a separate repo for each post? Feels like overkill :/

— Charlie Joey Hadley (@charliejhadley) January 3, 2018

A few folks suggested that I use Gists, which is a great service provided by Github for hosting collections of files and code.

I’ve already used Gists before for asking longer form questions on Twitter. It’s definitely a good stop gap for reproducibility where data files aren’t programmatically available and the license allows me to rehost the data (with citation). So in the future, if I use Kaggle datasets (for example) I will rehost the data on Gist along with the code for analysing the data and a link to the original blogpost.

Lastly, whenever I do host code on Gist I’ll use the excellent reprex library which helps guarantee reproducible code samples. reprex is developed by the awesome @jennybryan.

reprex preps #rstats examples for github or stackoverflow and it’s even better now! Pls test.https://t.co/kQ0BfRNiRz pic.twitter.com/z8zCTlaskA

— Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan) September 14, 2015

reproducibility Ratings

I wanted to introduce a way to rate my blogposts in terms of their reproducibility, with the following considerations:

• Is the author citable?
• Is the data citable?
• Is the code citable (and replicable)?

I deciced the best way to do that was to design an insert for the top and bottom of all my posts that looks like this:

It’s been designed so that it supports multiple post authors, multiple datasets and a link to the .Rmd that generated the blogpost you’re reading. The Citable X parts of the insert have a hover text encouraging folks to click on them, which links to a dedicated page explaining the rating system which I’ll keep updated over time.

At the time of writing this blogpost the rating system works as follows:

For the time being I’m going to be manually adding these components to my posts, but I have a placeholder repository where I’ll package together tools I regularly use for the blog into. If you do take a look at the .Rmd files including these ratings, you’ll notice I use the following trick from RMarkdown to allow for neatly indented HTML that remains unprocessed by knitr:

    <!--html_preserve-->
        <strong>This will render as HTML not preformatted text</strong>
    <!--/html_preserve-->

Unfortunately, manually inserting raw HTML into the top of each blogpost made the post summaries on the blog page next to useless. Thankfully, Yihui has a blogpost on modifying hugo post summaries that was fairly easy to implement. To be explicit, I introduced the following code:

<p class="intro">
{{ with .Description }}
{{ $.Scratch.Set "summary" (markdownify .) }}
{{ else }}
{{ $.Scratch.Set "summary" ((delimit (findRE "(<p.*?>(.|\n)*?</p>\\s*)+" .Content) "[…] ") | plainify | truncate (default 200 .Site.Params.summary_length) (default " …" .Site.Params.text.truncated ) | replaceRE "&" "&" | safeHTML) }}
{{ end }}
{{ $.Scratch.Get "summary" }}
</p>

… into these two locations, in place of <p class="intro">{{ .Summary }}</p>

# layouts/_default/single.html
# layouts/partial/recent_posts.html

This actually was a blessing in disguise, as I had wanted more flexibility over my post summaries. Now I can not only write completely custom click-bait summaries, I can also include emojis 🐰 and raw HTML by adding this to the YAML of a post:

    description: >
      <ul>
      <li>Bunny! 🐰</li>
      <li>Cat! 🐱</li>
      </ul>