This repository hosts the content of the Hamilton Institute blog (https://hamilton-institute.github.io/docs/), where our research group publishes blog posts about a wide variety of topics. Currently, we are focusing on our COVID-19 in Ireland project, so the posts will be mainly related to our findings regarding this subject

This is a jekyll based website, but if you have any familiarity with R/Rmarkdown, the contribution will be very simple. First, two main R packages need to be installed:

• knitr
• distill

They're both available from CRAN. If you are interested in publishing a post in this blog, follow these steps:

0. Clone this repository in your local machine. If you don't know how to do that, please follow this guide or ask another member of the group for help.

If this is not your first time writing a blog post, please pull the repository changes first, also described in the previous link. Not doing this will generate conflicts between your local folder and the current state of the repository.

1. Assuming R and RStudio to be already installed, open a new RStudio session in the repository you just cloned. Preferably, you can use an RStudio project.

2. In your RStudio session, check if your directory is set to be your local folder of the blog repository and load the two packages:

# install.packages("knitr","distill")
library(knitr)
library(distill)

4. Run the following command to create a new rmarkdown file for your post:

create_post("Insert the title of you post here")

This will create a new folder in the _posts folder, where the content of your post will be stored.

5. Open the new rmarkdown file and write the post. You can follow the guidelines at this link for more details on how to write a distill rmarkdown post.

Since the post is rmarkdown based, it will accept pretty much everything that rmarkdown uses: R code, python code, images, html tags, etc. For guidelines on how to use rmarkdown, please see this link.

6. Knit your rmarkdown file, by either clicking the 'knit' button on RStudio or using the command + enter + k shortcut. Please verify that an .html file was created in your post folder, and check that everything is as you expected it to be in that file.

7. At last, run the following in your RStudio session:

library(rmarkdown)
render_site()

And check how your post looks like in the blog, by opening the docs/index.html and going to the Posts section of the blog.

8. Upload your new post to the GitHub repository, as described at this link. At this step, please avoid uploading objects such as

• The .DS_Store objects
• The .Rproj file, in case you created one in your local machine

Those objects are not part of the blog and shouldn't be uploaded. In addition, since this repository belongs to a big group, please avoid changing other features of the blog without letting the maintainers know first. A small change in one of the core files might lead the blog to fully stop working.

After this, you're done and your post will soon appear in the blog! If you have any questions, please raise an issue or get in touch via Slack.