 This video is part of the public health to data science rebrand program. Hi everyone, it's Monica Wahee here, your public health data science mentor, giving you unsolicited advice as usual. It's my best kind. Today we are going to talk more about data science portfolio projects. Actually, we are not even going to go that far. We are going to start at step zero. And that is getting you ready to actually do portfolio projects in data science and post them on a public blog. You might ask, why post data science portfolio projects on a public blog? Isn't GitHub good enough? Well, let me show you why GitHub is not good enough. Okay, this is a GitHub link from a little project I posted on my blog that you could consider a portfolio project. See how it just has some code and a read me? Now I'll show you why you need a blog. Let's click on this link in the read me and go to my blog post. Okay, here we are at my blog. What do you see first? Exactly, you see a nice Likert scale plot. You can see that I'm a discriminating data scientist. You will see I did a YouTube video too. It's up to you how much you want to demonstrate to a future employer that you are great at visual and verbal communication. Okay, hopefully I've convinced you that you at least need to set up a blog so you have a place to post your data science portfolio projects to showcase them. And maybe even a YouTube channel depending on how far you want to go and what knowledge domain you are in. Yes, definitely linked to your GitHub from the blog, but the blog is needed to annotate your code and explain your project. You want prospective employers not to be confused when they learn about your past projects. In fact, you want them to be wowed and your blog is your opportunity to do that. Okay, so let's admit it. If we are building careers in data science, we are probably good with data. But maybe we don't know anything about blogs. Well, I admit there was a time when I didn't know anything about blogs at all. So now I'm going to go over what the current decision space looks like when it comes to setting up a data science blog to showcase your portfolio projects today. Let me first define for you what I exactly mean when I say blog. A blog is basically a web interface given to the user that makes it easy to make web pages in a certain format called posts. These blog posts are essentially written articles with links to sources, which is other content on the internet. That's the bare minimum needed for something to be a blog, in my opinion. Now, we want to have a data science portfolio project blog. So we want to add more than just writing and links. We want to add images, especially data visualizations. Some of you might want to make white papers that users can download. Or you might be like me and want to make a YouTube video and link to it on your blog. Also, you will see that some people set up their data science blog to have ads on it. For example, I like to go to the QuickR blog for data science guidance. Let's see all these distracting ads. I feel so frustrated when I try to use this blog. I'm already frustrated enough if I'm googling for code. So my strong recommendation is to avoid having ads on your data science blog at all costs. You will see the only ads on my data science blog are ads for my own stuff. And I try to make them intelligent, creative, and not annoying, so as not to insult my bespoke audience. So that is my first point to make. I would recommend avoiding having ads on your data science blog. And now, to my second point, and that is that a blog is basically a web-based display of data. By that, I mean textual data, like the wording for the blog post, and also image data, like the images of plots you might put on the blog. And if you make YouTube videos like me, well, that video file is now owned by YouTube, theoretically. I think you are coming around to my second point, which is ownership and control of your data. I don't mean your data science data set. I mean the data that make up the content that you post on your blog. Medium is an example of one of those blog platforms that lets you program your blog into their online community. The advantage is your blog post is immediately exposed to a community and is supported and promoted. But the disadvantage is that Medium owns it. I saw a lot of censorship of Medium during the pandemic, and after that, I basically started avoiding it. Some data scientists use another platform called Substack, but I haven't used that. On the other hand, you will see that I like to post articles on LinkedIn, but that's mainly because I'm already a LinkedIn learning author, and I want to continue the dialogue with my learning community on that platform. I admit I actually have used a version of WordPress that is like Medium and Substack and is called WordPress.com. Like Medium and Substack, WordPress.com is free and online and comes with its own community. I have two use cases for the WordPress.com site I want to show you. Here is the first, which is a WordPress.com blog I made myself while at a blog workshop at Mass Hack 2014. I basically made this while at the workshop so I could practice with the facilitator with saying. It was a great workshop. If you want details, go read the blog. But seriously, if you are going on an excursion, maybe on a cruise or to a museum, or you are enjoying nature at a park on a trail, or you are like me and love any excuse to take photos or videos of your pet cat or dog, think of making a little blog. Take a few pictures and some video. Think of a story. Then make a little blog like I did about Mass Hack 2014 in WordPress.com just to practice. Yesterday, a woman commented on the cheerful design on the back of my backpack as I was walking to the train station. That is something I could put in a blog post about walking around Boston, for example. You are going to have to get good at telling stories with data, so it doesn't hurt to practice the skill of storytelling. But there is another use case for WordPress.com besides making a personal blog to practice blogging. That use case is for individuals or groups who want to make a public blog, but don't want all the technological overhead associated with maintaining your own blog. Here is an example of a blog with a lot of technological overhead. It is the blog from Data Robot, a company that hosts a platform for developing artificial intelligence algorithms. Data Robot probably has people hired at their company who can maintain this blog on their servers at datarobot.com. On the contrary, you will see authors on Medium, Substack, and WordPress.com are not writing to promote companies, even if they work at places like Data Robot. They might be celebrities or thought leaders already employed somewhere else who want to have a personal blog that is not connected to their workplace. I see journalists from mainstream media having blogs on Medium and Substack, for example. So now, I'm going to show you a good example of using WordPress.com in data science, an example that is somewhat parallel to celebrity bloggers or journalists using a service like WordPress.com, Medium, or Substack to get their personal views into the public domain. A group of colleagues and I got together to do some voluntary research into the type of child abuse called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. We are all scientists and we just wanted to write a public blog to provide information to the public about this problem. The scientific articles are very hard to understand, so we wanted to explain them to the public and also contribute some of our experiences. WordPress.com was a great solution for us because we didn't mind if there were ads and we didn't have any time or money to invest in actually setting up and maintaining the blog. We also didn't mind that the web address for our blog was proxyprojectresearch.wordpress.com. We didn't care about branding. But, what if WordPress.com decided that what we posted was too controversial? After all, it is about child abuse. They could just shut us down. And that brings me to explaining a more robust alternative with the WordPress software, which is what I use for my company's blog. Now, I'm going to highlight an important point about WordPress. The term WordPress.com literally means that site I just showed you, where you can start a free blog. The term WordPress.org, however, refers to the nonprofit organization that is in charge of the WordPress software, which is open source. The WordPress software is software that runs on a web server. If you have a company like me, then you can create a relationship with a web design company to set up a web page for it, like I did. Then you are basically renting space on that web design company's server. After that, if the web designer and you agree to set up your web page in WordPress, the web designer can download free WordPress software and deploy it on their web server for your company. Then you can program your entire company's web page in WordPress. Let's say you want to do that. I suggest you do what I did and look on the internet for a local web designer. I'm in Boston, so I searched Yelp for a web designer in Boston. I used Yelp, but you can use any approach you want. Or if you know someone with a nice company web page that looks like it is in WordPress, you can try to figure out what company designed it and contact them. Using Yelp is how I found my web designer, Slick Boston Solutions, which is run by Gabriel Goaga. I know almost nothing about web design. But, obviously, I knew how to use WordPress because I went to that workshop. So I asked Gabriel to help me set up my website in WordPress, and he did. He helped me get my domain, which is DeathWench.com. Then he put the WordPress software on part of his server and set up my blank web page in WordPress. We talked about what pages to have, these permanent ones like this about page. You don't need many pages. Then he set up the blog for me. He charges me a very reasonable annual price to keep the blog on his server and to have me be the only person making posts. That way he can keep the security around the server high for a low annual price. But Gabriel and Slick Boston, like most web design companies, can do so much more. If my company grows to be huge, I can just hire Gabriel and other consultants to create content for the web page and blog and build it up. Gabriel also knows how to improve the marketing and visibility of the blog. I could pay him and others to help me with that. I just don't right now because I don't have the need or the money. Do not be shy about asking for free consultations with web designers like Gabriel. They will talk to you about what pages you want, what you want for your blog and what you plan to do with your business. If your needs are small, like mine, the web designer will quote you a very reasonable price. If you are unsure after getting one quote, get another from a different web design company. Remember, the web designer and you will likely have a long term relationship. So you want to pick the right person to make sure the relationship is good. Which brings me to my next point. Presumably, if you are starting a data science blog, you are a learner near the beginning of your data science journey. You are probably not a data science company like me. So why would you ever go with a solution like mine where I set things up with Gabriel and Slick Boston and have an annual fee to pay? Let me start my answer by showing you two data science blogs I really like. First, here is the blog of Dr. Bob Munchen, who is a biostatistics professor at Columbia University and a very kind man. He writes books on SAS and R and he wrote this amazing blog post where he reported on the popularity of various statistical software based on his analysis of job position announcements posted on Indeed.com. As you can see, there are all those annoying ads on this blog, but that's not because he's using some platform like Medium or WordPress.com. How do I know? See here, the blog is on the server of R for stats.com. So Dr. Munchen has his own Gabriel of Slick Boston, so to speak. This means that if you click on one of these ads, Dr. Munchen actually makes money, not WordPress.com or any other company. So controlling the ads is what you want to be able to do. Either have them and make your own money like Dr. Munchen or don't have them and have a clean presentation like I do on my blog. And you can't do that with one of these platforms like Medium or WordPress.com. So this is the first reason why a regular average Jane like you learning data science might want to invest in a web designer and part of a server. You might really care about making money from ads, or as in my case, creating an exclusive online atmosphere of hospitality. But the other main reason why you might want to invest in a blog like Dr. Munchen is that you are really serious about planning your data science career and you want to create a personal brand. Here's the other blog I wanted to show you. This blog, called Eager Eyes, is the blog of Dr. Robert Cosera. He's a data scientist with a specialty in visualizations who works at the software company Tableau. So this is his blog and it reflects his own personal brand. I strongly encourage you to follow it. It's really interesting. Actually, the Eager Eyes blog has been around a while and has given me a lot of inspiration from my blog in terms of format, tone, and topics. Now, let's pretend that Dr. Cosera decided to leave Tableau right now and get a different job. Don't you think showing his Eager Eyes blog to a prospective employer would be tantalizing to them? He probably can't show any of his proprietary work at Tableau. That would be illegal. So this blog could really bolster his efforts to get a new job. But even better, what if Dr. Cosera wanted to start his own company, like I did? Well, then all he'd have to do is contact his web designer, change his blog around a little bit, and he'd have his whole company webpage set up. Dr. Cosera has been working on his blog for years, longer than I have been working on mine. So if you are the type of data scientist who hates ads and wants to have a long-term career of data science blogging, strongly consider setting up your own blog with your own web designer the way Bob Munchen and Robert Cosera did. I guess you can tell I have a proclivity for data scientists named Robert. So let me sum up the points to consider when deciding whether or not to actually engage in a web designer and pay an annual fee. First, if you want to avoid ads on your data science blog, at least for now until you are famous like Dr. Munchen, then I strongly advise you to engage with a web designer and set up a WordPress page like I did. Also, think of your long-term goals with the blog. Are you laying the foundation for a freelancing career or a personal brand like the blogging Roberts I showed you? Or are you just trying to play around with WordPress software to get good at it the way I was doing at the workshop at MassHack 2014? You also want to consider how much you want to learn about what I call the data science of blogging. In other words, do you really want to learn what you need to know if you were to be in charge of a data science blog at a company like DataRobot? Do you want to expand your learning so that you really understand not only the data part of data science, but the communication part of data science? If that is your goal, then you should really opt for doing it the harder, more expensive way in setting up your own personal blog from the start. And even if you actually decide to do that and you feel weird about it like you don't know if you want to actually use WordPress software like I did and you might be interested in trying out blogging platforms like Medium and Substack, then just start with a non-data science blog on a blog platform like WordPress.com or the other ones I mentioned. So far I have talked about the pros and cons of blogging using an established platform like Medium or WordPress.com as compared to actually setting up your own personal blog, getting a web designer to help you, and using the WordPress software. Now I'm just going to focus on blogs using the WordPress software because it's popular and a lot of viewers of this video will probably end up choosing either WordPress.com or WordPress software on a web designer server as a solution. An important choice that needs to be made at the beginning of setting up a WordPress blog is called choosing a theme. Remember how a blog is just a display of data? Well, the WordPress theme is like a template that shows you how your data are going to be displayed. So while I know that both the child abuse blog my colleagues and I worked on and my company's blog are in WordPress, as you can see, they have totally different looks. That's because they use different themes. Whether you use WordPress.com or WordPress and a web designer, you will need to choose a theme at the beginning. If you change the theme later, it will screw up your blog's display, so you have to choose wisely. WordPress.com offers some free themes. I encourage you to choose one of those if you are making a practice blog. One place you can shop for themes is Theme Forest. Let's look at their technology themes. See this live preview? You can click on this to see how the theme will behave. As you can see in the live preview, they have menus and displays with stock images and fake content, so you can imagine what the theme would look like if it was used for your data science blog. It shows you all the features, but on a data science blog, you will probably just use a few. You have to use your imagination to weigh if you think you'd like the theme or not for your intended use. In my case, Gabriel requested that I use what is known as the WooCommerce theme. This is an advanced theme that is easy for web designers like Gabriel to reprogram. See how my website is red and black and has my logo? Well, a web designer who knows WordPress can make your website look like anything in the WooCommerce theme. So, if you choose the web designer route and choose to set up a WordPress blog, I encourage you to just go with whatever theme the web designer recommends, like I did. They can change it up for you however you want. It's when you are using the WordPress.com site for a practice blog that you will want to be picky about what theme you choose. And this brings me to my last topic, and that is, what about Wix for a data science blog? I admit, I have seen learners in colleges create portfolio projects in design fields like interior design and graphic design in Wix for college assignments. But I myself do not know much about Wix, so I did some research to learn how Wix figures into the decision space around setting up a data science blog. Here is an article from Forbes that focuses on the difference between Wix and WordPress. Now that you know all about WordPress, because I just told you, you will better understand what this article has to say about Wix. Let me read a few sentences that stood out to me. With Wix, you pay a monthly fee that encompasses both your website and hosting. WordPress.org is free, but you pay a hosting company to host your site. While Wix is very easy to use, it's not nearly as customizable as WordPress.org. In the same vein, WordPress.org has a learning curve not found in Wix. So let me interpret that for you. As you know, with WordPress, you can choose the easy, free, ad-written WordPress.com route. Or you can choose the route with more overhead where you have to hire a web designer to host your WordPress blog at a cost. Remember how I said I pay Gabriel at Slick Boston a small, reasonable annual fee? With Wix, you are kind of a halfway step between using a totally free WordPress.com and paying a web designer for web hosting services. Instead, in Wix, you pay Wix a monthly fee and Wix hosts your webpage for you. So what happens if you have a Wix blog and, I don't know, mess it up somehow? What could you do to fix it? I know when I mess up my blog, I just contact Gabriel and he fixes it for me. So what would you do with Wix? Well, remember how I said that it didn't really matter what WordPress theme I picked from my company website because Gabriel said he can program anything? That's partly because he's a really good web designer and partly because WordPress was designed to have people like Gabriel customize it. So if you go with WordPress on a web designer server, you know you can get someone to customize it the way you want. Even if Gabriel is too busy, I could get someone to work on it. But Wix is not really designed for the designer. Even if I tried to pay Gabriel to go into a Wix blog and fix it, he wouldn't have the same freedom and functionality he'd have at his disposal in WordPress. Remember, Wix is hosted on Wix's server, not the web designers. So what if you don't want to engage a web designer and you want to do it all yourself, but you don't want to use WordPress.com? Then maybe Wix is for you. I admit the learning curve for using WordPress, even WordPress.com, was steep for me. As you can tell, I went to a workshop and made a few WordPress.com blogs before I could get the hang of it. Users of Wix report that it is so much easier to figure out how to use than WordPress. But again, I always come back to who owns your data, meaning who owns your blog's data. If you have a practice blog on WordPress.com, maybe you don't mind WordPress having a picture of your cat. I don't mind them having my MassHack 2014 blog on their server. But if I set up a Wix blog and paid the monthly, I'd be thinking, what if Wix locked me out one day? But what if they said I violated their terms of service or something? And even companies like Xerox went out of business? What if Wix went out of business? I hate to say it, but this literally gets back to the whole concept of open source. WordPress is open source. The software is community built, and it's not going away. Wix is a good company, and everyone I know who has a Wix blog loves it. But those people tend to be interior and graphic designers, like I said, not data scientists. I don't think I have seen a data science blog in Wix. If you have one or know of one, please link us to it in the comments. In fact, if you are watching this and you have experienced making data science blogs, please give us all some words of wisdom in the comments to this video. We could all use the tips and tricks. And if you do start a data science blog after watching this video, don't forget to come back and put a link in the comments so we can all go visit it. And if you enjoyed this video and it inspired you to start your own data science blog, please hit the like button and strongly consider subscribing to my channel. Thank you for your attention and happy blogging. Thank you for watching this video, which is part of the Public Health Today to Science rebrand program. If you are interested in joining the program, please sign up for a 30-minute Zoom interview using the link in the description.