Contributing articles

We very much appreciate contributions to the Posit AI Blog from the broader R community. If you are interested in publishing some of your own work or insights, we’d love to hear from you!

Articles posted on the Posit AI Blog are authored using Distill for R Markdown. The easiest way to contribute a new article is as follows:

  1. Create a fork of the Posit AI blog repository on GitHub.

  2. In your fork, create a new branch that will contain your distill article. When you’re done, please check in the raw Rmd plus any static files you might have added to the post’s source directory. Don’t check in any generated files, such as html.

  3. Be sure that you’ve included all required article metadata (see below for details).

  4. Post an issue on the Posit AI Blog repo requesting that we accept your article (be sure to include a link back to your article’s GitHub repo!).

Once we see your issue we’ll take a look at your article, suggest changes as necessary, then publish it when it’s ready.

Article metadata

To be included in the blog, your article should include some standard metadata fields. Here’s an example of a post that includes all required metadata:

---
title: "Classifying physical activity from smartphone data with Keras"
description: |
  Using Keras to train a convolutional neural network to classify physical
  activity. The dataset was built from the recordings of 30 subjects
  performing basic activities and postural transitions while carrying a
  waist-mounted smartphone with embedded inertial sensors.
author:
  - name: Nick Strayer
    url: http://nickstrayer.me
    affiliation: Vanderbilt University
    affiliation_url: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/biostatistics-graduate/
date: 07-17-2018
creative_commons: CC BY
repository_url: https://github.com/nstrayer/activity_detection_post
output:
  distill::distill_article:
    self_contained: false
---

Note that the author field includes a URL for the author as well as their affiliation (you can include multiple authors). Note also the creative_commons field which marks the article as being share-able (all contributed posts must have a Creative Commons license). Finally, the repository_url is used to provide links from the article back to GitHub.

Article preview

Please note after submitting a PR for this repository, GitHub workflow will start building a preview version of Posit AI blog that includes your article. Once this build completes, a directory named ‘ai-blog-preview’ will be uploaded in a zip file as the build artifact. If you would like to browse this preview version locally, please follow the steps in Downloading workflow artifacts to download ai-blog-preview.zip, unzip it, and open ai-blog-preview/index.html in your browser. You should then be able to see your article on the landing page of the preview.