--- /dev/null
+[[!meta title="Introducing Sweavealike"]]
+
+I use [R](http://www.r-project.org) a lot. It's one of the primary
+tools I use in my day job as a scientist analyzing large datasets. If
+you use [LaTeX](http://ctan.org) with R (as I often do), you probably
+use Sweave to interleave R output and figures with your text
+describing those figures using the noweb method of literate
+programming.
+
+[Sweavealike](http://git.donarmstrong.com/?p=ikiwiki_plugins.git;a=blob;f=sweavealike.pm;hb=HEAD)
+ is a plugin for [IkiWiki](http://ikiwiki.info) that tries
+to do some of the useful things for IkiWiki that sweave does for R and
+LaTeX.
+
+You use it like the following:
+
+ \[[!sweavealike echo=1 code="""
+ a <- 1
+ a <- a + 10
+ print(a)
+ """]]
+
+which produces this result when run:
+
+[[!sweavealike echo=1 code="""
+a <- 1
+a <- a + 10
+print(a)
+"""]]
+
+You can also generate figures with it:
+
+ \[[!sweavealike fig=1 echo=1 results="hide" code="""
+ plot(1:10,(1:10)^2,xlab="x",ylab=expression(x^2),main="Example Figure")
+ """]]
+
+[[!sweavealike fig=1 echo=1 results="hide" code="""
+plot(1:10,(1:10)^2,xlab="x",ylab=expression(x^2),main="Example Figure")
+"""]]
+
+The plugin itself uses the neat Statistics::R perl module to handle
+all of the heavy lifting. I personally plan on using this plugin to
+help write some more entries in my learning R series of posts that I'm
+beginning to work on. Hopefully I'll find and fix most of the bugs as
+I embark on that process so anyone else who uses the plugin won't, but
+feel free to e-mail me if something isn't working as it should.
+
+Finally, you shouldn't run this plugin on a publicly editable
+IkiWiki instance, because that would be a trivial local user exploit
+as R can run arbitrary code, read and write to arbitrary files,
+exhaust all memory, etc.
+
+[[!tag ikiwiki debian tech r]]