Publications by Dean Attali's R Blog

Knitr’s best hidden gem: spin

24.03.2015

Stop knitting & start spinning – spin can help you write reports much faster and avoid repeating yourself – Anyone who loves the idea of dynamic report generation with R is probably a big fan of knitr and its flagship function – knit. But not many people seem to know about knit’s awesome cousin – spin. What is spin? In short: ...

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ggExtra: R package for adding marginal histograms to ggplot2

29.03.2015

My first CRAN package, ggExtra, contains several functions to enhance ggplot2, with the most important one being ggExtra::ggMarginal() – a function that finally allows easily adding marginal density plots or histograms to scatterplots. Availability You can read the full README describing the functionality in detail or browse the source code on ...

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Supplementing your R package with a Shiny app

22.04.2015

The R community is generally very fond of open-source-ness and the idea of releasing all code to the public. Writing packages has become such an easy experience now that Hadley's devtools is so powerful, and as a result there are new packages being released by useRs every single day. A good package needs to have two things: useful functionality, ...

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Introducing shinyjs: perform common JavaScript operations in Shiny apps using plain R code

23.04.2015

shinyjs is my second R package that managed to find its way past the CRAN review process. It lets you perform common useful JavaScript operations in Shiny applications without having to know any JavaScript. Demos You can check out a demo Shiny app that lets you play around with some of the functionality that shinyjs makes available, or have a loo...

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How to get your very own RStudio Server and Shiny Server with DigitalOcean

09.05.2015

If you've always wanted to have an RStudio Server of your own so that you can access R from anywhere, or your own Shiny Server to host your awesome shiny apps, DigitalOcean (DO) can help you get there easily. DigitalOcean provides virtual private servers (they call each server a droplet), which means that you can pay $5/month to have your own ser...

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Analyzing R-Bloggers’ posts via Twitter

18.05.2015

For those who don’t know, every time a new blog post gets added to R-Bloggers, it gets a corresponding tweet by @Rbloggers, which gets seen by Rbloggers’ ~20k followers fairly fast. And every time my post gets published, I can’t help but check up on how many people gave that tweet some Twitter love, ie. “favorite”d or “retweet”ed it...

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New shinyjs version: Useful tools for any Shiny app developer + easily call JavaScript functions as R code

31.05.2015

About a month ago I made an announcement about the initial release of shinyjs. After some feedback, a few feature requests, and numerous hours of work, I’m excited to say that a new version of shinyjs v0.0.6.2 was made available on CRAN this week. The package’s main objective is to make shiny app development better and easier by allowing you ...

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Mimicking a Google Form with a Shiny app

14.06.2015

In this post we will walk through the steps required to build a shiny app that mimicks a Google Form. It will allow users to submit responses to some input fields, save their data, and allow admins to view the submitted responses. Like many of my other posts, it may seem lengthy, but that’s only because I like to go into fine details to ensure...

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Shiny finally has a colour picker – use colourInput to select colours in Shiny apps

28.06.2015

I don’t always think Shiny is missing anything, but when I do – I fill in the gap myself. That was meant to be read as The Most Interesting Man In The World, but now that I think about it – maybe he’s not the type of guy who would be building Shiny R packages… Shiny has many useful input controls, but there was one that was always miss...

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Persistent data storage in Shiny apps

01.07.2015

This article is also published on RStudio’s Shiny Articles Shiny apps often need to save data, either to load it back into a different session or to simply log some information. However, common methods of storing data from R may not work well with Shiny. Functions like write.csv() and saveRDS() save data locally, but consider how shinyapps.io ...

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