Writing Posts

Posts live in content/posts as Markdown files with optional frontmatter.

---
title: A Post Title
date: 2026-05-10T18:30:00+01:00
---

Your post content goes here.

To create a post locally with the right filename and frontmatter:

npx inkstead new post

Inkstead asks whether the post is a long article or a note. Articles get a title field and an empty body; notes use the text you enter as the body and omit title.

If syndication is enabled for the site, new articles and notes include the enabled text-capable providers in syndicate by default. Photo-only providers are skipped for text posts.

Articles, Notes, And Photo Notes

Inkstead infers the kind of post from the content:

Inkstead infers photo notes from Markdown or HTML images in the body.

Pages live in content/pages and never syndicate.

Permalinks

Posts use dated permalinks by default:

/2026/05/10/my-post/

That keeps URLs stable even if two posts share similar titles over time.

Photos

For photo posts, add a Markdown image to an untitled post:

---
date: 2026-05-10T18:30:00+01:00
---

Morning coffee.

![](/photos/coffee.jpg)

You can keep original files in content/photos and reference the public path you want your theme to render.

During builds, Inkstead copies content/photos to /photos/, resizes very large images to a reasonable web size, and strips metadata from the copied files. Your originals in content/photos are left unchanged. Passthrough assets are not optimized.

You can tune or disable this in site.config.ts:

export default defineConfig({
  photos: {
    optimize: true,
    maxWidth: 2400,
    maxHeight: 2400,
    quality: 82
  }
});

Categories

Posts can include one or more categories:

categories:
  - Photography
  - Travel

When categories are present, Inkstead generates paginated category indexes at /categories/<category>/ and RSS feeds at /categories/<category>/feed.xml.

Posts in nested folders under content/posts also receive categories from their directory names. For example, content/posts/essays/my-post.md is assigned to Essays even without category frontmatter. Posts directly inside content/posts only use frontmatter categories.

Pagination

Inkstead paginates the homepage and category indexes automatically. By default, each index page shows 20 posts before creating pages like:

/page/2/
/categories/photography/page/2/

The default theme includes Newer and Older links when more pages exist.

To change the number of posts per page:

export default defineConfig({
  pagination: {
    postsPerPage: 10
  }
});

Excerpts

Article index excerpts use summary frontmatter when present:

summary: A short custom introduction for index pages.

Without summary, Inkstead uses the content before <!--more-->.

This appears on index pages.

<!--more-->

This only appears on the post page.

Themes can use post.excerpt and post.hasMore. post.excerpt is rendered HTML, so Markdown links and formatting work on index pages.

If neither summary nor <!--more--> exists, Inkstead creates a short excerpt from the post body automatically.

Raw HTML And Line Breaks

Markdown supports raw HTML and hard line breaks by default. That means small HTML snippets are preserved, and single newlines inside a paragraph render as <br>.

© 2026 Ivo Nunes