Confessions of a dumb blogger

I was dumb enough not to know how to get R codes into my posts right until in the last few of them.

From the beginning, I wrote my posts in MS Word and later in Open Office Writer. I created my pictures in GIMP. Then I copy and paste the text of the post on to the “Compose” sheet for my new post in Blogger. I never bothered to learn HTML and so I didn't select the other option, that is, “HTML”. The text was OK. Next, I upload my pictures and place them in my post, and it was OK too.

But when I paste my text containing R code, it went funny. For example

would come out on the blog as

So, what I did was make a picture of the R code by first converting the text of the code in Open Office Writer to pdf format, and then converting it into a picture with GIMP. It worked, but the resolution of the code wasn't that good. Also, the downside of it was that you couldn't copy the code from my post and run it on the R console directly or via a script file.

Well, that isn't my problem, I must have thought, until recently. Then, I tried inserting R code that was more than a page long to my post in the usual way via an image. But the result turned out to be ugly!

So I tried processing my post first by converting my draft directly to HTML in Open Office Writer. But it didn't work. Next I tried using Notepad++ for conversion to HTML and it didn't work either. May be because I didn't know them well enough and may be I should visit them again later.

Now I can see that the obvious solution will be to type my post out on the “Compose” sheet of Blogger. But it seemed like the dumbest thing to do, even for a dummy like me. Since the text of my posts which have been composed with Open Office Writer could be pasted without problem on to the compose sheet of Blogger, the next step in my preferred workflow would be to correctly add my R code by copy and paste from my R scripts, and finally to upload and paste my pictures. As I've shown earlier, I would need to format my codes in some way so that they would be displayed correctly in my post.

So I looked around for some solution and luckily found a number of alternatives. Generally I would need to look for some kind of markdown language since we were told that the Markdown language was created with the goal of enabling people "to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, and optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML(or HTML)". That led me to StackEdit, though after a good deal of false leads and frustrations.

To start with, like a lot of other guys, I thought that if I could convert my post into Google docs format I would be able copy and paste it to Blogger. But in reality it was not to be.

Fortunately I found that I could just copy the content from my Open Office Writer document and paste it directly to Blogger! However, R codes and data tables will not come out correctly and images will not come out at all. Anyway, I wanted to confirm if it is really impossible to copy and paste from Google docs to Blogger and found that it is indeed impossible (in a post from Blogger Help Forum here). Besides, a number of alternatives were suggested and there I found mmplex's suggestion for StackEdit attractive as “a free online markdown editor that allows directly posting to blogger. You can edit offline also and synchronize your documents with drive or dropbox. It even works pretty well in a tablet. Notice that it's far more powerful than docs if you post math formulas or code snippets.”

I added StackEdit application from the chrome web store:

(1) Now let's write my toy example in Open Office Writer:

(2) Then I copy and paste it in Blogger compose sheet:

(3) Looks fine, but … preview gives:

(4) So I open the StackEdit application and paste my two lines of R code.

(5) Then I click the hash button in the navigation bar and choose to save it to disk as HTML.

What I need to do now is to insert my two lines of R code formatted as HTML into my unfinished blogger post previewed in step (3) above. To finish it -

(6) I open the saved HTML file of R code in Chrome, view page source, copy it and replace the incorrectly formatted lines of R code in the HTML sheet in Blogger

and finally get it right!

About the line “Written with StackEdit.” added by the StackEdit application, the answer by benweet of October 19, 2013 said:

“I'm the creator of StackEdit, which is designed to write Markdown documents and blog posts, not to write questions/answers on Stack Exchange. As mentioned in StackEdit's settings, this footer is to encourage users to support the project by adding a backlink in their documents/posts. It's there by default but it's fully removable/customizable.

Since it's a free application and it has no budget for advertising, I'm opposed to removing it from the application. However I will add few words about this issue in the settings or in the welcome document.”

Well, I chose to delete that line before I was aware of benweet's reply, and still do so. I hope he won't mind.

As for this post, you'll have noticed that I said nothing about formatting and other goodies of StackEdit. That's because I still need to learn … and as for you, stray further if you like. Have fun, and do experiment!

Still one thing. Why was such a fuss that Open Office Writer could convert my post to HTML with ease, but wouldn't come out correctly in Blogger?

This remark refers to HTML produced by RStudio but it could as well be applicable to HTML produced by Open Office Writer, or some other application:

“You might think that you’d simply be able to open up the source HTML in a text editor, copy the source code, and paste it into your blog editor as HTML. But the HTML file that R produces is probably going to be swarmed with hundreds (or, gasp, thousands) of lines of disgusting Javascript. This almost certainly won’t be supported by your blogging site, and you’ll end up with a blank page.”