This is my first post, just to try out posting to a website. I haven’t tried to create a website before, so the results may be a bit shoddy!
In addition to actually having an online presence, I hope to use this site to post blogs on some topics which I’m working on or are of interest to me (although we’ll see how long I keep that up for…). These blogs will mainly be me playing around with a few different topics to help me understand them better and so that I can refer back to them when I inevitably forget things - If anyone else reads them and finds them helpful, then all the better!
Some topics I’m hoping to cover include: causal inference (DAGs, confounding, selection bias, etc.), methods (simulations, structured life course models, multiple imputation for missing data, inverse-probability weighting, etc.), and anything else which captures my interest.
About the site: For those interested, I built the website using the ‘blogdown’ package in RStudio, following the amazing guides here and here. The site uses the ‘hugo-lithium’ theme, partly because this is the default in the blogdown book, and partly (well, predominantly) because I couldn’t get other themes (such as ‘wowchemy/starter-academic’) to work - Obviously I’m doing something wrong, but have no idea what!
Other than the theme issues, creating and editing the site has actually been relatively painless. All the content is version-controlled using Git (see here for an excellent introduction), uploaded to my GitHub repo for the site, and then compiled into a proper website using netlify (which you can sign up to using your GitHub log-in).
Once this is all in place, any updates I make to the site and push to GitHub are automatically updated on the actual site - Noice!
(And if that all sounds rather complicated, try to take solace in the fact that if I - a not especially tech-savvy person - can do this, you probably can too!)