Blogs made with blogdown and hugo

Sometime ago, I switched my blog from Wordpress to hugo and blogdown. Blogdown is a package to create static websites from R. The result is that I can blog from RStudio, simply by editing a R markdown and later hugo takes care of the it to produce the result you see here. There are many guides in the web to get you started with hugo and blogdown, including ones I put together to create this blog (here, here, and here).

But nothing tells you better how good is blogdown + hugo than showing some beautiful examples of blogs created with that system. One of the critical parts of using blogdown is choosing the hugo theme for your blog. Apart from the visual aspect and the hugo theme forces you to use a particular way to show the information in your blog. You can always modify the theme, but it will take you some CSS and hugo skills to do it. To help guide other people with that complicated decision, here is a collection of blogs I love with snapshots of how they look and the theme they use:

• Lifelong Learning the personal/professional blog by Diego Usai. It uses the Casper 2 theme which is the same I used here for my blog. Unfortunately, the theme hasn’t been updated in a while, so use it at your own peril.

• Alison Hill has modified the Blogophonic hugo theme and has created this beautiful, highly-customizable, and well-documented Apéro hugo-blogdown theme. She uses it for her amazing blog, and has been rapidly adopted by many other bloggers.

• Matt Dancho has just released his portfoliodown package, the data science portfolio website builder based on hugo and blogdown. He uses it for his website, which is perfect to showcase projects.

• Desirée de Leon blog is based on the ubiquitous Academic theme for Hugo (it is now call Wowchemy). It is a very structured theme, but, in turn, most blogs based con Academic have the same look, same structure. Desirée has modified it to look stunning, very visual and easy to navigate.

I will add more blogs as I discover them. This list is very personal, because I like blogs which are very visual and look different from the rest. In case you didn’t find anyone useful, you can always navigate this gallery of hugo themes where you can order them by how recently were updated or how many github stars they got.