The idea behind slumdown

The slum theme for Hugo and blogdown is an adaptation Yihue Xie’s Xmin theme that borrows stylistic elements from the Tufte R Markdown theme and from the academic Hugo theme. Originally it was intended to be extremely minimal, with the very modest goal of trying to make sure I understood the logic of how Hugo generates static sites. The more I played with it though, the more I enjoyed it. So what I ended up with is a “Somewhat-Light Unhelpfully-Minimal” Hugo theme that I’m intending to use on my blog.

As it developed, I started getting annoyed at the fact that Hugo themes don’t make their colour schemes easily accessible, which means it’s hard to generate plots in R that match the visual style of the blog. So I decided to adapt the slum theme so that the colour templates were easily accessible, and wrote the slumdown package so that I’d have a convenient user interface.

All in all, this has been a fun excercise, and I’ve learned quite a bit about Hugo, blogdown, and CSS in the process. I’m definitely keen on the idea of developing “blogdown aware” Hugo themes like slum alongside R packages like slumdown that take advantage of this.