---
title: Configurable options for website
layout: default_with_disqus
output: bookdown::html_chapter
---

# Configurable options for website, etc
2014-10-05

## Yaml package
I'm still banging away at getting the website put together.  I had a nice
time writing a little R code to generate the dates for different sessions 
on the syllabus.  Needing to define `StartSun` for the date of the Sunday
before the first session made me think that it would be nice to take all
the mutable elements (Dates, Authors, Places, etc.) and just define R variables
for them that will then be available to the rmarkdown processor.  It looks like 
a super cool way to define all these things will be to use the yaml R package:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/yaml/yaml.pdf  Check it out!

## Starting blogs
I have a little shell function in `extras/start_post.sh` that works well for creating
the appropriately named rmd files for blogs.