Articles by Yongfu, Liao

When is it safe to plant your seedlings outside? Or: Should you consult the Saints or trust the data?

May 21, 2021 | Yongfu, Liao

Over the last couple of weeks, we kept asking ourselves when would be the best time to transplant our seedlings out into the garden? We wanted to make sure that they’d be safe from night frost, but a warm spell in late April or early May might still be ...

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Getting Tabular Data Through JavaScript in Compiled R Markdown Documents

September 8, 2020 | Yongfu, Liao

Recently, I have learned more about JavaScript and created a few JS web apps. This gave me the idea that we can separate the content and the data in an HTML document to make it more dynamic—the content stays static while the data could be updated indep... [Read more...]

Gender balance in the Irish elections a.k.a. an excellent excuse to learn how to create stacked point plots and butterfly plots in R!

February 23, 2020 | Yongfu, Liao

With the most recent Irish General Election having concluded last month, I got interested in looking at some of the available data and trying to see how they could be visualized with R. Here, we’ll have a look on how to use stacked dot plots and butt...

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Temperature changes in Germany visualized in R

November 5, 2019 | Yongfu, Liao

Recently ZEIT online, a leading German online newspaper, published an article on long-term changes in temperature throughout the country based on publicly available data. The article included some very striking and informative visualization that I want...

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Tips to Reduce the Complexity of Slide Making with Xaringan

April 28, 2019 | Yongfu, Liao

Although I’m a strong believer in R Markdown, I’m not so sure about it in the realm of slide making. After using GUI slide making tools such as Powerpoint or Google Slides for years, it is not easy to get used to making slides with markdown, since it ... [Read more...]

Wrapper of knitr::include_graphics to Handle URLs & PDF Outputs

March 9, 2019 | Yongfu, Liao

Those who use knitr::include_graphics() frequently in their R Markdown files may discover some inconsistencies (from the user point of view) if the same Rmd is used for multiple output formats, especially when PDF (LaTeX) is involved. The following co... [Read more...]

Visualizing Language Loss in Taiwan: Create an “Age-Sex Pyramid of Language” with ggplot2

February 16, 2019 | Yongfu, Liao

Taiwan Language Survey is a small project I worked on during May to June in 2018. The idea was to create a survey that continuously collects data and a web page that visualizes the collected data. The web page is updated weekly using Travis-CI. The main purpose of this survey is ...

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Inserting “Edit on GitHub” Buttons in a Single R Markdown Document

February 9, 2019 | Yongfu, Liao

As the R Markdown ecosystem becomes larger, users now may encounter situations where they have to make decisions on which output format of R Markdown to use. One may found none of the formats suitable – the features essential to the output document one wants may scatter across different output formats ...

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Using Travis-CI to Create R-bloggers for Taiwan

January 29, 2019 | Yongfu, Liao

R-bloggers.com is a great platform for R users, but I sometimes feel awkward to publish posts on R-bloggers when I have things to share that are only relevant to users in Taiwan1. Inspired by R-bloggers, I thought maybe I could use Travis-CI and GitHub to create a blog that ... [Read more...]

Customizing Hugo / Blogdown RSS Templates

December 12, 2018 | Yongfu, Liao

Blogdown makes it easy to create Hugo blogs or personal websites, and it is becoming more and more popular in the R community. Once the blog is created, people might want to submit their blogs’ RSS feeds to R-bloggers. But before that can happen, one must modify the RSS template ... [Read more...]

Create a Glossary in R Markdown

October 23, 2018 | Yongfu, Liao

I was thinking about creating a glossary in bookdown and found out that there was already an issue about it. I like Yihui’s recommendation: use Pandoc’s definition lists. This was exactly what I had been doing, but I quickly found out that there was a major drawback – the ...

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Easy Linguistics Document Writing with R Markdown

September 8, 2018 | Yongfu, Liao

I’ve written a post about rendering IPA symbols properly regardless of the output format of the R Markdown document. I implemented the ideas into an R package, linguisticsdown. linguisticsdown provides a Shiny interface to facilitate inserting IPA s... [Read more...]

Rendering IPA Symbols in R Markdown

September 5, 2018 | Yongfu, Liao

I was thinking about promoting reproducible research in Linguistics, or more precisely, how to attract people with no programming skills to have incentives to learn at least a bit programming, so that they have the ability to make their research more reproducible. I arrived at the solution: start by adopting ... [Read more...]

Making Jekyll Blog Suitable for R-bloggers

August 1, 2018 | Yongfu, Liao

According to the post add your blog, adding one’s blog to R-bloggers isn’t easy at all, especially for people who use R Markdown to write posts and use Jekyll to generate static web page on GitHub. Two reasons make it difficult: The feed you submit should ONLY be ...

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My Notes on R Markdown

July 22, 2018 | Yongfu, Liao

I’ve used R Markdown to do lots of work, such as writing a book, doing homework on statistics and ecology, and making web pages. The above mentioned are all HTML output formats from R Markdown, but PDF output formats are also possible, such as this ... [Read more...]

Articles by Yongfu, Liao

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