Code for making static graphs of regional data

[RichardMN]

I've worked to get my chart-making code for Lithuania running with the latest version of covidregionaldata, get a workflow of my own running to render it, and then make it generic so it can be run on (nearly) any source of regional data.

It's all over in http://github.com/RichardMN/lithuaniacovidgraphs

I would welcome comments and suggestions - including whether it may be worth trying to turn this into a vignette. My concern with doing so is that it depends on several more packages.

This used to be an Rmarkdown file. I broke it out into something which will just generate the graphs so that it could be run as a cron job (possibly through an action, possibly on a home machine) to regularly update the graphs without having to run rmarkdown or pkgdown or ... I'm also not quite sure how to frame the conditions into Rmarkdown but figure this could be sorted out.

[seabbs]

This looks really nice Richard, really like the ridge plot usage for incidence (I don't think I have seen that before).

Could be interesting as a vignette but you are right might lead to package bloat. Could also add to the use cases vignette that I proposed and never got anywhere with.

In the past I have made parameterised Rmarkdown reports + shiny interfaces in packages and it can be a lot of work but can also be worth doing. I think probably something for a companion package though as it is of lots of use to a subset of users and no use to others (who just want the data for modelling etc and won't use any vis but their own (i.e me)).

[RichardMN]

I've reworked this and renamed it as http://github.com/RichardMN/covidregionaldatagraphs

The code now can be run with the params function (and shiny) but also has a script which renders for nearly all the data sources we have (currently excluding some of the ones I know are broken) and a workflow to try to automate updating in github.

[seabbs]

This is really great!

We should definitely link out to this from the package site. Perhaps from the other articles drop down?

Something that would be really nice to do with this is render the pages into html. One way of doing this potentially would be to render from Rmd -> md but useknitr::render to keep the name as Rmd. If you did this into the vignettes folder you could use pgkdown to make a nice simple site. Other options of course like distill etc but all a bit more effort.

[RichardMN]

I had so far been avoiding rendering into HTML because of some size constraints. (It currently generates HTML but excludes it using a .gitignore line.) I've now set up https://richardmn.github.io/covidregionaldatagraphs/ which is not pretty but I think I can set up an action so that a single action generates updated .md and .png files and then transfers them across to the github.io site repo.

Currently it's also crashing out on UK and USA data and I need to find a way to get it to fail cleanly when there is a problem downloading. I'd been using safely and quietly but I think I may need to push these down in to the Rmarkdown, but then will need to make the Rmarkdown render fail more gracefully if there is no data. (And ideally not overwrite existing, if dated, output.)

[seabbs]

Yes, that makes total sense. Looks good and sounds like a great idea.

Ah yes that makes sense. Not sure what the best solution is for that. Perhaps a safely call on the data download and if it fails for any reason set the global knitr eval arg to FALSE to avoid anything else rendering?