This is the 2025 edition of the website of the Zurich R User Group. The Zurich R user group is one of the largest and most established European user groups of the R Project for Statistical Computing. The website is built with the Astro Web Framework and uses HTML/CSS as well as a bit Typescript/Javascript. Our blog uses the open-source scientific and technical publishing system Quarto. This allows contributions to the blog from completely within the data science realm, no additional web dev knowledge required.
Our blog is the most dynamic part of our website and therefore uses a data science toolstack to foster data science posts including R code and analyses. We plan to cover all of our meetup events, group news, some R highlights and possibly an occasional guest post. The following guide assumes that you have cloned this repository.
If you do not want run R code, e.g., to create figures or tables, and your blog post just consists of markdown text and few images, simply using markdown without the likes of Quarto, knitr or notebooks is the best choice. To do so, simply create a new branch
git checkout -b somepost
and copy our template file to posts folder
cp src/quarto/template.qmd src/content/blog/somepost/index.md
Where somepost is the slug/folder name of your blogpost, choose a lowercase only, meaningful name.
Use kebap-case-style if you like for better readability.
Don't be fooled by the quarto folder name of the template, we just use one template for all types of posts.
Edit the newly created file in src/content/blog/somepost/index.md.
Once you're done commit and push the markdown file to the remote repository, issue a pull request and assign a reviewer.
When the blog post is reviewed and merged, it gets published by GitHub Actions in automated fashion.
Create a separate branch for the new post.
git checkout -b somepost
The src/quarto folder contains a template.qmd file.
In a first step please copy the template.qmd file to index.qmd.
cp template.qmd index.qmd
Edit the newly created index.qmd like you would edit any quarto file.
Please do not alter or remove the yaml frontmatter tags themselves to guarantee proper rendering.
Simply edit their content.
The following command renders your post to Markdown and places it within a folder where Astro finds the file.
In the process R code gets executed, possibly other files such as images or data outputs are stored alongside a markdown file when qmd gets turned into md.
quarto render index.qmd --to markdown --output-dir ../content/blog/somepost
(This will be obsolete in the future when the step is automated.) Remove all quarto/bootstrap specific .css classes from the index.md file in ../content/blog/somepost, i.e., remove all ::: cell lines and other triple colon :::.
This is necessary because we use a tailwind CSS based layout.
By pushing to GitHub and merging into the main branch, the blog post is automatically rendered from Markddown to HTML.
git add src/content/blog/somepost
git commit -m 'publish somepost'
git push -u origin somepost
After pushing, assign a reviewer on GitHub and get your blog post merged.
To get started, you can clone this repository and install the dependencies.
git clone [email protected]:Zurich-R-User-Group/zurich-r-user-group.github.io.gitcd zurich-r-user-group.github.io # navigate to the project folder
npm install
npm run devInside the folder zurich-r-user-group.github.io, you'll see the following folders and files:
/
├── public/
│ └── ...
├── src/
│ ├── components/
│ │ └── ...
│ ├── layouts/
│ │ └── ...
│ └── pages/
│ └── ...
└── package.json
The different webpages, i.e. the main page can be found under src/pages/. Currently only the pages about.astro, blog.astro and host.astro exist. The index.astro just combines all components which can be found on the main page. The layout of the pages can be found under src/layouts/. The components used in the pages can be found under src/components/.
Simply edit public/events.csv to update the past events table.