It's a bit confusing and imposes more cognitive load to start setting up a parameter and then just leave it to go set up other stuff. The setup code here and elsewhere would be a lot cleaner if we could construct such things all in one go, except where they have non-trivial graph dependencies. So here it would be easier to:
set up date_str
set up new_env and new_info
get_params_str
set up new_url
finish new_env and new_info