This is (roughly) the lightning talk I gave in useR2011. If you are a reader of R-bloggers.com then this talk is not likely to tell you anything new. However, if you have a friend, college or student who is a new useRs of R, this talk will offer him a decent introduction to what the R blogosphere is all about.

The talk is a call for people of the R community to participate more in reading, writing and interacting with blogs.

I was encouraged to record this talk per the request of Chel Hee Lee, so it may be used in the recent useR conference in Korea (2011)

The talk (briefly) goes through:

1. The widespread influence of the R blogosphere
2. What R bloggers write about
3. How to encourage a blogger you enjoy reading to keep writing
4. How to start your own R blog (just go to wordpress.com)
5. Basic tips about writing a blog
6. One advice about marketing your R blog (add it to R-bloggers.com)
7. And two thoughts about the future of R blogging (more bloggers and readers, and more interactive online visualization)

My apologies for any of the glitches in my English. For more talks about R, you can visit the R user groups blog. I hope more speakers from useR 2011 will consider uploading their talks online.

A year ago (on December 9th 2009), I wrote about founding R-bloggers.com, an (unofficial) online R journal written by bloggers who agreed to contribute their R articles to the site.

In this post I wish to celebrate R-bloggers’ first birthday by sharing with you:

1. Links to the top 14 posts of 2010
2. Reflections about the origin of R-bloggers
3. Statistics on “how well” R-bloggers did this year
4. Links to other related projects
5. An invitation for sponsors/supporters to help keep the site alive

1. Top 14 R posts of 2010

R-bloggers’ success is largely owed to the content submitted by the R bloggers themselves.  The R community currently has 143 active R bloggers (links to the blogs are clearly visible in the right navigation bar on the R-bloggers homepage).  In a little over one year, these bloggers wrote almost 3,000 posts about R.  That is amazing!

Here is a list of the top visited posts on the site in 2010:

• 100 Prisoners, 100 lines of code
• Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers
• Getting Started with Sweave: R, LaTeX, Eclipse, StatET, & TeXlipse
• Why Use R?
• “simply start over and build something better”
• R Tutorial Series: R Beginner’s Guide and R Bloggers Updates
• Select operations on R data frames
• Hacker News User Base Changed?
• Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining
• Fantasy football (oops, soccer)
• Delete rows from R data frame
• Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R
• Advanced graphics in R
• How to build a world-beating predictive model using R

2. Motivation for creating R-bloggers

Originally, the idea for R-bloggers came when, over a year ago, I spent several hours trying to find bloggers who wrote about R.  I was successful in finding roughly 14 R bloggers (and too many blog posts of people talking about pirates).  This experience led me to wonder how many other people like myself were also struggling to find these bloggers.  The second thought I had was the answer to the following question: “What can I offer an R blogger so that he will tell me that he exists?”  The answer I came up with is “audience and traffic” – and that’s what R-bloggers tries to achieve: the site offers the blogger audience and traffic in exchange for the blogger giving permission to republish their “R content” on the site.

Part of my motivation was that, as one of these bloggers who wrote about R (here, on R-statistics.com), I too hoped to gain more audience and traffic for my content.   R-bloggers helped me achieve this goal.

3. Statistics – how well did R-bloggers do this year

There are several matrices one can consider when evaluating the success of a website.  I’ll present a few of them here and will begin by talking about the visitors to the site.

This year, the site was visited by about 286,000 “Absolute Unique Visitors.”  There was a total of nearly 600,000 visits and over 1 million page-views.  People have surfed the site from over 200 countries, with the greatest number of visitors coming from the United States (40%) and then followed by the United Kingdom (6.8%), Germany (6.6%), Canada (4.9%), France (3.3%), and other countries.

The site has received between 15,000 to 25,000 visits a week in the past few months, and I suspect this number will remain stable in the next few months (unless something very interesting will happen).

I believe this number will stay constant thanks to visitors’ loyalty: 60% of the site’s visits came from returning users.

Another indicator of reader loyalty is the number of subscribers to R-bloggers as counted by feedburner, which includes both RSS readers and e-mail subscribers.  The range of subscribers is estimated to be between 2600 to 2900.

Thus it seems that R-bloggers succeeds in offering a real service to the R users community.

4. Projects related to R-bloggers

During the last year I have created several R-bloggers clone sites in the hopes of serving other audiences.  I started a multilingual version of R-bloggers at www.r-bloggers.com/lang/ (currently hosting 7 bloggers, written in Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish).  I hope more will join the site in the future.

I’ve also started 3 other promising such sites: SAS-x.com, DanceBloggers.com and forex-bloggers.com.  How will they do?  Only time will tell.

5. Invitation to sponsor/advertise on R-bloggers

Due to the increase in the site’s popularity, 4 months ago I had to upgrade R-bloggers’ hosting account to a VPS hosting, which had directed me to decide on attempting to add ads to R-bloggers so to keep the site self sufficient financially.

So in the hopes of keeping the site sustainable in the long run, I am now (somewhat forced) to make this call: if you are interested in sponsoring/placing ads/supporting R-bloggers, then you’re welcome to contact me.

Happy new year!
Yours,
Tal Galili

Today I was informed of (what I believe is) a better the best WordPress plugin for R syntax highlighting called WP-CodeBox.  This plugin doesn’t require any hacks to make it work (as opposed to the WP-Syntax plugin, which I wrote about in the past).  WP-CodeBox can be downloaded and installed on a WordPress by searching for it in the “Add New” section in the plugins menu.

WP-CodeBox provides some nice features (some AJAX based) to the display of the code in the post:

1. The code box in the post can now be folded (top right of the code box) so the code can be hidden so to not clutter the post (if the code is too long)
2. The code box is added with another button  (top left of the code box) which allows the reader to see the code in a new window – so to easily enable a copy paste of the code.
3. The options of the plugin allows automatic row numbering of the code, control over “tab” length and some other features.

Usage

After installing (and activating) the plugin, in order to add R code to your post you will need to:
1) Only work in HTML mode (not the Visual mode). Or else, the code you will paste will be messed up.
2) Put your code between the <pre> tag, like this:

(Note: make sure that you rewrite the ” – so it will work.)

<pre lang=”rsplus” line=”1″>

…Your R code here…

</pre>

p.s: Lastly, my thanks goes to guangchuang yu who’s comment on my original post, and he’s post on wp-codebox and R, has introduced me to this better plugin.

p.p.s: in case you blog on WordPress.com, there is also a solution for R syntax highlighting for WordPress.com bloggers.

In case you have a self hosted WordPress blog, and you wish to show your R code in it, how would you do it?

The simplest solution would be to just paste the code as plain text, which will look like this:

x <- rnorm(100, mean = 2, sd = 3)
plot(x, xlab = “index”, main = “Example code”)

But if you would like to help our readers orient themselves inside your code by giving different colors to different commands in the code (a.k.a: syntax highlighting). So it would like something like this:

1
2

x <- rnorm(100, mean = 2, sd = 3) # Creating a vector
plot(x, xlab = "index", main = "Example code") # Plotting it

How then would you do it?

Plugin Installation

The easiest way to do this inside a self hosted WordPress blog is by installing a plugin called WP-Syntax:

WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages (including R). It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.

But there is a problem. The current WP-Syntax version is using an old version of GeSHi, and only the newer version (currently GeSHi version 1.0.8.6) includes support for R syntax. In order to solve this I patched the plugin and I encourage you to download (the fixed version of) WP-Syntax from here, which will allow you to highlight your R code.

Usage

After installing (and activating) the plugin, in order to add R code to your post you will need to:
1) Only work in HTML mode (not the Visual mode). Or else, the code you will paste will be messed up.
2) Put your code between the <pre> tag, like this:

(Note: make sure that you rewrite the ” – so it will work.)

<pre lang=”rsplus” line=”1″>

…Your R code here…

</pre>

Final note: R Syntax highlight in other ways

If you wish to have R syntax higlight inside an HTML file, I encourage you can have a look at the highlight package, by Romain Francois.

If you want to higlight your R syntax inside wordpress.com, here is a blog post by Erik Iverson showing how to do that using Emacs.

p.s: If you have a blog in which you write about R, please let me know about it in the comments (Or just join R-bloggers.com) – I’d love to follow you

Update: Stephen Turner wrote about a syntax highlighting solution for R and blogger using github gist. And also mentioned there another solution for self hosted wordpress blogs, via J.D. Long: a Github Gist plugin for WordPress. Go publish code

I already wrote about R-bloggers on the R mailing list, so it only seems fitting to write about it more here. I will explain what R-bloggers is and then move to explain what I hope it will accomplish.

R-Bloggers.com is a central hub of content collected from bloggers who write about R (in English) and if you are an R blogger you can join it by filling in this form.

I built the site with the aspiration to  help R bloggers and users to connect and follow the “R blogosphere”. When I am writing these words, R-bloggers already has 17 blogs in it, and I hope for many (many) more.

How does R-Bloggers operate? This site aggregates feeds (only with permission!) from participating R blogs. The beginnings of each participating blog’s posts will automatically be displayed on the main page with links to the original posts; inside every post there is a link to the original blog and links to other related articles. While all participating blogs have links in the “Contributors” section of our sidebar

What does R-Bloggers offer it’s visitors?

• Discover (for all): Find new R blogs you didn’t know about. And Search in them for content you want.
• Follow (for people who don’t use RSS): Enter your e-mail and subscribe to receive a daily digest with teasers of new posts from participating blogs. You will more easily get a sense of hot topics in the R blogosphere.
• Connect (for facebook users): Click on “Fan this site” to become a “fan” of R Bloggers. You can then “friend” other people and share thoughts on our wall. Or just by leaving comments on the blog.
• Participate (for bloggers): Add your R blog to get increased visibility (for readers and search engines) with permanent links on our Contributors sidebar. Your blog will also gain visibility via our e-mail digest and through your presence on the main page with posts.

Who started R-Bloggers (and way)? R Bloggers was started by Tal Galili (well, me).  After searching for numerous R blogs I decided that there must be more R blogs our there then he knows about, and maybe the best way for finding them is to make them find him.

After writing about it in the R mailing list, I got some good feedbacks but also questions about why use only R blogs and not all the R feeds that exist. Who is the website actually for (when there are services like Google reader for us to read our feeds with), and what am I hoping it will do. So here is what I answered:

For me there are two audiences:
One is that of the web 2.0 power users. That is, people who know what RSS is and use it, maybe evern write their own blogs. These people have only one problem (as I see it) that R-bloggers tries to solve, and that is to know who else lives in their ecosystem. Who else they should follow.
For that, google reader recommendation system is great, but not enough. A much better system is if there was a one place where all R bloggers would go, write down their website, and all of us would know they exist. That is what R-bloggers offers for the power users. I think this is also why over 20 of them subscribed to the site RSS feed.
BTW, The origin of this idea came to me when I was trying to find all the dance bloggers for my wife (who is a dance researcher and blogger herself). After a while we started http://www.dancebloggers.com/ while knowing of only 10 bloggers. They list now has over 80 bloggers, most of which we would have not known about without this hub.
The same thing I am trying to do for the R community, that is way I hope more R bloggers would write about the service – so their network of readers which includes other R bloggers would add themselves and we will all know about them.
If that was my only purpose, a simple directory would have been enough. But I also have a second one and that is to help the second audience.

The second audience I am thinking of are people of our community who are not so much early adopters (and actually quite late adapters) of the new facilities that the new web (a.k.a: web 2.0) provides.
To them the all RSS thing is too much to look at, and they are used to e-mails. And because of that they are (until now) disconected from many of the R bloggers out there, simply because it is in-efficient for them to go through all these blogs each day (or even week). So for them, to see all the content in one place (and even get an e-mail about it) would be (I hope) a service. I believe that’s why 5 of them (so far) has subscribed via e-mail.
I also hope teachers will direct their students to this as a resource for getting a sense of what people who are using R are doing.
Another thing that hints me about the R community is seeing how the “facebook fan box” is still empty. Which tells me that (sadly) very few R users are actively using facebook as a means for connecting with the outer networks of people out there.

All I wrote also explains why R-bloggers will only take feeds of bloggers and only (as much as can be said) their posts that are centered around R (hence the website name ).
It both follows what Gabor talked about – having a site who’s content is only about R. But also what I wish, which is to have “content” in the sense of articles to read (mostly). And not so much things like news feeds of wikipedia or new packages published.

I hope this post will both notify people about this new resource, encourage more R bloggers to join, and will help for future people to better understand what this R-Bloggers thing is all about