Can you have a "post" be a direct hyperlink to a web page, app, or some other end point?

[JasonAizkalns]

I am currently setting up a distill blog site and have a need to link directly to non-post endpoints. However, I would still like these "articles" to show up in my listing page. Imagine I have an "article" that links directly to a web page (e.g. community.rstudio.com) or to a shiny application.

Why would I want to do this?
I would still like to leverage all the metadata to populate on article/posts listing page -- I get the description, publish date, author, preview image, and categories/tagging.

For example, say I have a shiny app that uses the tidyverse and is about forecasting -- our YAML might look like this:

---
title: "Tidyverse Forecasting App"
description: |
  This is a shiny application that covers forecasting time series.
author:
  - name: Jason Aizkalns
date: 11-01-2021
output:
  distill::distill_article:
    self_contained: false 
categories:
  - tidyverse
  - forecasting
---

As a result, this shows up in the listing page, but also the category listing pages for tidyverse and forecasting (nice!). However, I don't need an "actual post" when someone clicks on this article. I just need them to launch or redirect immediately to the shiny application.

Can I do this somehow in the YAML? Or some other method?

Even better if I can set it to open in a new tab like (<a href="" target = "_blank"></a>).

+++

NOTE: I am not interested in embedding via an iframe or knitr::include_url or htmltools::includeHTML. I would really like to just "go" to the page. Think a gallery of shiny apps or existing applications / HTML documents, maybe bookdown documents (kind of like a catalog, discovery page, feels similar to connectwidgets).

+++

[cderv]

I don't think that is possible. This would be a feature request for distill.

However, you may be able to do this by creating a post but using a HTML redirect as content so that your user don't see the post but is directly redirected.

Redirections in HTTP - HTTP | MDN

Redirections in HTTP - HTTP | MDN

I think this could be possible with distill (but didn't try), either by tweaking the header-includes part.

[JasonAizkalns]

Thank you. After poking around for a few hours, I would agree. Thank you for the nudge on redirects -- something I still might explore and I'll try and post back here and/or on SO if I'm successful.

I ended up going static gallery/portfolio page instead.

This feels (?) like a gap, however, in the R ecosystem. I think connectwidgets is closing this gap , but might be a little tool-server specific.

[cderv]

@JasonAizkalns

This feels (?) like a gap, however, in the R ecosystem.

Which exactly is the gap ? Sorry I may have not completly follow

[JasonAizkalns]

Sorry, I can be more clear. Just a simple "search and discovery" tool of various data products (e.g. Rmarkdown, interactive HTML, Shiny, APIs). Think a landing page with tags/categories and then some other meta data (maybe author, update/modify date) that can be filtered with select-ize dropdowns, search, checkboxes, radio buttons, or filters. Very similar to e-commerce shopping site, but instead browsing apparel/products, you're browsing peoples' data outputs/works.

Airbnb open-sourced Knowledge Repo which is similar in spirit.

I think this is starting to happen with connectwidgets.

In my experience, once organizations get to 3+ data scientists / data analysts, these artifacts start to scatter all over the place. Wheels get reinvented. Things can get siloed or, worse, go unnoticed. Even worse, they stay on a laptop/desktop and never really go "public".

Just get them all "landed" somewhere as a springboard for search, discovery, socialization, democratization, and collaboration.

Probably too big of an ask/scope, but it feels like we're really close with distill/blogdown/connectwidgets.

FWIW, I landed on a solution with bootstrap + filterizr and a mild templating system based on a JSON file giving all the properties for a "card" or "body of work" (e.g. author, title, description, categories, URL). To add a new work, people just add a record to the JSON file.

[cderv]

That is a really interesting idea.

I think some people do that using blogdown and a portofolio-like theme, but I understand that something more output of the box with YAML entry for example would work.

In similar fashion we use a gallery for our example page in pkgdown website like Example sites • blogdown
No advanced feature like filtering and all I see the point.

I'll note that somewhere - hard to open a feature request somewhere because it is something cross project. Thanks for sharing this idea!