Distill - configuration problem

[jimrothstein]

Distill | YAML - documentation?

Trying to set up very simple blog with Distill (and github pages).
Lots of tutorials. So I have no problem with .Rmd in the root directory.
These are handled just fine ... all good.

But rmarkdown::render(".") seems to ignore the .Rmd files in my posts/ directory. (see below).
It must be some simple configuration/yaml, but I can not find it.

Any suggestions for documentation?
Note: I do not use Rstudio.
Thx.

blog4/

• index.Rmd
• about.Rmd
• _site.yml
• _posts/ <--- ignored by render()

[rmf]

Yes. I found this annoying too. After trying to get it to work for hours, I am starting to think that's how is supposed to be. Each post or Rmd is to be rendered individually using rmarkdown::render() and then rmarkdown::render_site() seems to just copy them into the export directory I think. It behaves differently from the regular Rmarkdown website. It would make more sense if they left it at the default behaviour and added knit=FALSE or something inside rmarkdown::render_site() to avoid building the Rmds.

Anyhow, this is my understanding, but looking forward to some explanation.

[apreshill]

Yes- this is documented behavior by design, some info here: Distill for R Markdown: Creating a Blog

[jimrothstein]

That's it! You must separately (manually or otherwise) knit posts.

After this line:

create_post("The Sharpe Ratio", draft = TRUE)

(Emphasis added)

You work on blog posts independent of the enclosing website (use Knit to render and preview the post just like any R Markdown document). This is in fact the only way to update post content — posts are considered standalone documents that are not re-rendered when the site is built. This is because posts are often expensive to render and have R package dependencies that may be difficult to satisfy as time goes on.