CRAN Hugo shortcodes • Adventures in data

Lately, I have been testing Hugo as a blogging platform.

It is very R-friendly thanks to R package blogdown: as a result, you can write both in Markdown (.md) and in R Markdown (.Rmd), to create interactive blog posts.

CRAN links

The first issue I encountered was the necessity to insert links to a CRAN package without copy-pasting the whole link everywhere.
This was the first occasion to experiment with Hugo shortcodes!

In short, save the following line to the file layouts/shortcodes/cran.html in your Hugo tree:

<a href="https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/{{ .Get 0 }}/">{{ .Get 0 }}</a>

Then, to make a link to the blogdown package, you can simply write

{{< cran blogdown >}}

somewhere in your post.

And here is the result: blogdown

CRAN badges

Similarly, one can insert CRAN badges for a package using the following shortcode:

<a href="https://cran.r-project.org/package={{ .Get 0 }}" class="image-link"><img src="https://www.r-pkg.org/badges/version/{{ .Get 0 }}"></img></a>

Save it as layouts/shortcodes/cran-badge.html as before.

A badge for the dplyr package can be inserted as follows:

{{< cran-badge dplyr >}}

To remove the link underline for some Hugo themes, you have to add and tweak your image-link CSS class to the /static/css/custom.css file:

.image-link {
   border-bottom: 0 !important;
}

Minimo inserts the underline by modifying the border-bottom property. Other themes might do otherwise, e.g. by changing text-decoration. Just find what works on your theme!