One of the nice things about bookdown is that, next to
the pdf version of your thesis that you’ll need for printing anyway, you
get a html version as well, with little to no extra effort! You can
easily share this version of your thesis online 1. There are an infinite
number of possibilities to make a website of course nowadays, but here’s
three ways to get your thesis online with as little fuss as
possible.
After rendering your thesis, you should have a /_book
folder containing a lot of html files. If you go to https://app.netlify.com/drop, you can simply drag and
drop this folder from your computer to this site. That’s it, your thesis
is now online! The only thing that’s left is to make an account on
Netlify, to claim the site as your own and to get a more stable url.
There’s also a dedicated RStudio server for hosting books made with
bookdown at https://bookdown.org/. All you have to do is sign-up at
https://bookdown.org/connect/. Afterwards, run the
bookdown::publish_book() function from the root folder of
your thesis, and you should be all set. See this
page in the bookdown manual for more information.
Writing your thesis as a bookdown book makes it very
suitable to version control, as all the .Rmd and associated
files that make up the thesis are simply plain text files. If you’re a
bit familiar with git and/or GitHub, I’d therefore highly recommend to
create a git repository for your thesis: it can be very nice to easily
switch back to a previous version.
If you’re using git/GitHub for your thesis anyway, it’s only a small extra step to publish the thesis via GitHub Pages. Again, see the bookdown manual for more info, but it boils down to the following steps:
output_dir: "docs" to your
_bookdown.yml file, which will put the rendered version of
your thesis into a directory called /docs (instead of the
default /_book).docs folder, create an empty file called
.nojekyll. This tells GitHub Pages not to try and use its
Jekyll framework to create the site;
we don’t need that if we’re using bookdown.github.com/<username>/<repository>).
Click “Settings”, scroll down to the “GitHub Pages” section, and under
“Source”, select master branch /docs folder. Give it a
little bit of time, and then a website with your thesis should be live
at <username>.github.io/<repository>!Of course, you can put the pdf online as well (e.g. in a place like https://thesiscommons.org/), and in fact you have to publicly archive the pdf in the UvA-DARE repository. But the html is much nicer to browse through digitally.↩︎