Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn’t Nesta packaged as a gem?
Releasing a nesta gem may be a good idea, but I’ve not done it yet as it hasn’t been necessary. I also think that git is a superb way to manage upgrades to software that the user is expected to modify. You can extend and configure your web site, confident in the knowledge that git merge will seamlessly keep you up to date with the latest updates and bug fixes.
Having said that I’m not against the idea of releasing Nesta as a gem, so long as there’s a good reason to do it. The best way to move the idea forward would be to start a discussion on the mailing list…
There are lots of CMS’s and blog engines around – why write another?
There were several reasons. In no particular order:
- I enjoyed it.
- I was sick of editing articles by copying and pasting text from my text editor into a web browser.
- I was really sick of Mephisto’s seemingly random decisions to mark lots of articles as new in my Atom feed when all I’d done was fix a typo in my latest article.
- I wanted to be able to write content that wasn’t automatically included in my feed (category pages never show up, and articles only show up if you set their date).
- I wanted to be able to apply Mark Nunney’s excellent SEO techniques (see point number 10, and his article on website structure) without resorting to a big system like Drupal.
When I update an article it isn’t republished to the Atom feed. Can I force it?
No, you can’t. One of my main irritations with other systems was that changes to an article could cause the article to be republished in my feed. This made me reluctant to fix typos or improve an article’s text. Guaranteeing that an article would never be re-listed in the Atom feed was therefore a design goal.
The only time an article will re-appear in the feed is if you rename the file on disk (i.e. give it a new permalink). You can prevent a renamed article from being re-published in the Atom feed by specifying the article’s Atom ID (setting it to the original value – see the documentation on creating pages for details).
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