One nice feature of the distill project templates is there is a checkbox for deploying to ghpages, which adds that (.nojekyll) for you. It might be nice to add to the bookdown template to help with discoverability:

https://github.com/rstudio/distill/blob/5c62b3d13b4137343ada3c0dc3d2457a796a937c/inst/rstudio/templates/project/website.dcf#L11-L14

Originally posted by @apreshill in #1087 (comment)