I have recently moved from building this blog via the distill package to blogdown. The main reason for this is that, at the time of writing, distill does not support full RSS feeds for multiple articles, which is a requirement for linking my blog to R-bloggers. Deploying the distill based blog via github pages was quite straightforward, but doing so for the blogdown based blog proved to be slightly more cumbersome.

While there are many good blog posts on deploying blogdown-blogs on github pages (e.g. here or here), I appear not to be the only one who ran into problems, as this stackoverflow thread with 100+ upvotes shows.

In my case, I needed to do two things for successful deployment on github pages:

1. Add a .nojekyll file to the main directory of the blog, e.g. by running file.create(".nojekyll") in the r console
2. Add a publishDir: docs statement below baseurl in the config.yaml file. Rebuilding via blogdown::build_site() then creates a docs folder and populates it with html. On github pages, I then needed to make sure that the blog is build based on this docs folder (see the image below). After that, I simply had to commit, push, and github actions would finally deploy the blog without any error messages!