Following section 1.7 in the blogdown documentation, to edit the website:

1. When you open RStudio, click the RStudio addin “Serve Site” to preview the site in RStudio Viewer. (This only needs to be done once every time you open the RStudio project or restart your R session.)
2. Use the “New Post” addin to create a new post or page, then start writing the content.
3. [Use the “Update Metadata” addin to modify the YAML metadata if necessary (not sure what this does)]
4. Save the new post file.
5. Push to Git

After pushing, the website should be automatically updated within a few seconds (under one minute) (because I’ve set up Netlify to continuously update from Git).

Note: section 1.5 of the blogdown documentation provides a good overview of why you should use R Markdown (.Rmd) rather than regular Markdown (.md). Essentially, .Rmd provides more functionality.