How to use newpost with a Quarto blog • newpost

library(newpost)

newpost is a simple, one-function package for Quarto blogs that (slightly) speeds up the process of creating a new blog post by creating a new folder and index.qmd file for a post. It uses the RStudio IDE’s API, so you do need to be running RStudio for this to work properly.

WARNING: This package will create folders and files on your system!

The newpost() function has one required argument: the headline for your post. If you run newpost("Welcome to my blog!") on March 8, 2025, it will create a folder 2025-03-08-welcome-to-my-blog in your blog’s posts directory, and also create an index.qmd file in that new directory with “Welcome to my blog!” as the YAML title. There are optional arguments for description, author, and categories. Categories should be a single comma-separated string and not a character vector, such as “General, Community”.

I suggest using a code snippet for this function, which gives you fill-in-the-blank code. I use this snippet, which I addded to my snippets with the usethis::edit_rstudio_snippets() function:

snippet qnp
    newpost::newpost("${1:headline}", "${2:description}", "${3:categories}", author = "Sharon Machlis")

Note that there needs to be a tab before newpost::newpost, not spaces.

When I type qnp and hit the tab key, I see this in my console:

newpost::newpost("headline", "description", "categories", author = "Sharon Machlis")

with the cursor having jumped to headline as a variable. After filling in the headline spot, you can tab to description and then tab again to categories.

If you want the date to be something besides the current date – perhaps you are creating a post you plan on publishing sometime in the future – you can also set the_date to be something like Sys.Date() + 1 for tomorrow.