Anatomy of an article

Okay, so how do you write an article?

Set the date

The only thing that makes an article different to a normal page in Nesta is that it has a date. If you check the Markdown source for this page you'll see the date in the chunk of metadata at the top of the file. It doesn't matter what order you enter your metadata; just make sure that you separate the meta data from the content with a blank line.

Set Summary to a brief overview (optional)

If you've just clicked through here from the home page (or the mark up page) you may have noticed that this article was summarised on that page, using an opening paragraph that is very different to this one. That's because this page has been given some specific summary text, using the Summary: metadata key.

If you'd rather your summary paragraph was just the first paragraph of your article, copy the first paragraph to the Summary: metadata after you've written it.

If we'd left the summary out, the entire article would be shown on the home page (or on any category pages on which it had been included). This is the approach that Tumblr takes; all recent posts are displayed on the same page.

Set more metadata

See the metadata reference for a full list of Nesta's built-in metadata. You can also add your own metadata, but this might not be the best place to explain that.

The main heading

So after the metadata, comes the heading. Define your heading on one line, in the manner that is understood by your chosen markup language. Headings should look like this, depending on the markup language you're using:

  • Markdown: # Heading
  • Textile: h1. Heading
  • Haml: %h1 Heading

Add another blank line after the heading, and then launch off into the copy of your page...