Using the GitHub website

In this section, we will be using the GitHub.com website and demonstrate that you do not need to be a programmer to use version control and edit files on GitHub.

Don’t have a GitHub account?

If you have not already created a GitHub username, please do so now:

GitHub: https://github.com
Follow optional advice on choosing your username

Our asks

As a Team of two

Help each other, everyone is bringing different skills! Talk it out!
Listen to each other; avoid judgment and solutioneering.
Have fun!

Prompt

We want to log the information about people’s favorite desserts using this repository.

Create a new repository

Create a repository using the following instructions steps 1-6

Edit the README

We want to make the following changes:

Replace the title (first line starting with #) with something better! Maybe Favorite Desserts
Add your name and your favorite dessert below the title: e.g. - Julien: crepes

Ask your partner what is their favorite desserts and add it to the list
Think of a relative and their potential favorite desserts and add it to the list; e.g. - Sophia: chocolate

Commit your changes

Click Commit changes
Add a descriptive commit message, “add my favorite dessert”

Click Commit changes to confirm

Add a csv file

Download this csv file about the most iconic desserts in America (according to this website https://www.eatthis.com/iconic-desserts-united-states/) to your computer. Note: depending on your web browser settings you might have to right-click on the page and select Save As.

Drag and drop it on the Github web page of your repository to upload it
Add a short message about the file e.g. Add iconic_desserts.csv & hit Commit changes
Your file has been uploaded 🪄. Click on the filename to see it!

You should have something similar to this repo: https://github.com/brunj7/favorite-desserts

Add an R script

This is the script we used to scrape the iconic desserts listing:

library(tidyverse)
library(rvest)  # use to scrape website content

# Check if that data folder exists and create it if not
dir.create("data", showWarnings = FALSE)

# Read the webpage code
webpage <- read_html("https://www.eatthis.com/iconic-desserts-united-states/")

# Extract the desserts listing
dessert_elements<- html_elements(webpage, "h2")
dessert_listing <- dessert_elements %>% 
  html_text2() %>%             # extracting the text associated with this type of element of the webpage
  as_tibble() %>%              # make it a data frame
  rename(dessert = value) %>%  # better name for the column
  head(.,-3) %>%               # 3 last ones were not desserts 
  rowid_to_column("rank") %>%  # adding a column using the row number as proxy for the rank
  write_csv("data/iconic_desserts.csv") # save it as csv

How would you add this code as an R Script to your repository?

Copy-paste the above code to your favorite text editor
Save the file as iconic_desserts.R
Drag and drop it on the Github web page of your repository

Bonus

Try to edit the csv file directly on GitHub to add your favorite dessert to the iconic list!

No need to be a programmer to contribute to analytical workflows with GitHub!!