There are a many tutorials and the great bookdown blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown with detailed steps on how to create a website using blogdown and Hugo.
I used the fantastic tutorial by Tyler Clavelle to create this blog. This website uses the blogdown R package and static site generator Hugo. I chose to use the Hugo creative portfolio theme, with side bar and tiles layout. I use Windows and GitHub repo to deploy the website.
This is a brief summary of my tips, discovered through trial error and many github pushes:
In order to change the style colours you need to specify the full style = “style.sea.css”, not just style= “sea” in the config.toml file
Once you have installed your theme, do not change any of the theme folder files. You can override these with updates or new files in your blog_down source directory. This is because of Hugo’s lookup order.
I was looking for a way to separate the projects and posts into content sections. In an attempt to do this, I created params.navlinks for post in the config file but this theme does not seem to work with list.html in any layout folder. There was an issue raised in github however the creator answered that the theme is designed to publish only to the portfolio.
After a bit of research on text editors, I am using Atom text editor to edit multiple R markdown and html files in the blogdown_source folder.
I have also transitioned from command line Git Bash to using a git client GitKraken and yes I am now happy with git. I am using GitKraken to stage, commit and push files to the kimnewzealand.github.io repo.