I’m excited to finally announce EnTyrely Too Much after an overly long gestation period.
Looking at the fantastic pages put together by everyone on rbind.io leaves me agog at the great company! My own blogging efforts are sporadic and mostly serve as a vehicle for my own learning about the internet. And oh! what a learning process that is. Painfully slow, with many steps sideways and back. Where are the tags?!1 Why are the chapter links in my bookdown book suddenly 404’ing?!!2
My blogging journey
I started blogging on blogspot.com back in 20083! aminpractice.blogspot.com gave me an outlet for a lot of research ideas and thoughts. But the longer I blogged, the more often I wanted to include R code and output in my blog posts. While this was possible, it was very painful. I was also finding the “Adaptive Management” theme a bit restrictive. Around 2015 I was learning about github.com, and starting to use RStudio in my teaching and research. When I first heard about blogdown I decided to jump ship, and set up my second academic blog at atyre2.github.io. That was working OK, although I was running afoul of Jekyll more than I liked.
I had the great good fortune to meet Yihui Xie in person when he spoke here at UNL in … maybe 2017. He told me about Hugo and rbind.io, and it seemed like a great opportunity to join a growing community and solve some of my technical problems as well.
At the time the blog was called “A few cheap shots” because I couldn’t think of anything better. The migration of the Jekyll content was more painful than I expected, although still pretty easy. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble by just starting fresh! I blogged only sporadically, ran into some health issues, ran into technical issues when attempting to update hugo-academic, and generally took 2018 off as a result.
Present Day
I’m still struggling health-wise, but getting the blog rebooted has been a source of sorely needed “completion”. I finally managed to get the Academic theme updated. I put out a call for help with renaming the blog that was wildly successful in tapping into the creative minds around me! I’m very partial to puns on my last name, and so after a couple attempts at direct democracy, I autocratically picked EnTyrely Too Much4.
I hope to be more regular in posting, facilitated by the fact I can now put advance dates in the posts to have them appear later without additional action from me. I will blog about whatever I want, but mostly going to be R, ecology, and probably Too Much (see what I did there?!) information about my mental health. See you out there!
