Awesome Blogdown Collage by [Mara Averick](https://twitter.com/dataandme)
Earlier this year, at RStudio::conf 2017, I heard about Yihui Xie’s Blogdown package for the first time. Blogdown is a fantastic tool kit for static website generation that works with R and RMarkdown, and built on top of the hugo static website generator.
I had used hugo a little for a previous version of my blog, but I update so infrequently that I’d forget how to use it from one update to the next. Blogdown solves this issue really nicely, by integrating into the RStudio IDE addin menu and with the added R compatability, it made switching to blogdown a no-brainer.
Shortly afterwards I set up awesome-blogdown on github, with the aim of it being somewhere the community could promote their awesome blogdown blogs. That version of awesome blogdown, which was just a list in the Github README.md, worked fine but it was not without issues. The worst of which that, as a linear list, options for discovery of new content were limited. Those blogs at the top, remained at the top, and new content was added to the bottom of the list.
In order to improve on the original Awesome Blogdown, today I’m taking the wraps off awesome-blogdown.com! It’s still a bit of a work in progress (the table doesn’t collapse for mobile too well yet for instance), but the layout is generally improved and the list is in a random order each time the page is loaded. Finally, updates can now be done to a simply structured JSON file. This file is the same one used by the website, and is therefore available at awesome-blogdown.com/sites.json, if you want to play around with it.
I hope you like the site, and find it useful and if you want to add your own blogdown blog to the list, head on over to Github, check out the instructions and submit a pull request!