Writing articles

There's really nothing special about a blog post. They're just web pages that are published on a certain date.

Imagine for a moment that we're writing a blog post for a site in which we often discuss food and travel. We can easily convert our web page into a blog post:

Date: 6 October 2009
Categories: food, travel

# Breakfast in Europe

This is a page about breakfast.

...

The top two lines don't appear on the page, but they tell Nesta a bit about the page (in other words, they're "metadata").

The Date: line is pretty straightforward; it defines the date that your post was published. The date is displayed on the page. It is also used when identifying the latest articles that should appear on your site's home page, and choosing articles to include in your site's Atom feed.

Categories: refers to other pages that collate information on topics related to this post. In the example above we're referring to pages stored in content/pages/food.mdown and content/pages/travel.mdown. A link to this post will automatically be included on the food and travel pages. Category pages are a great way to structure a web site; see the credits page for background info on categories.

The metadata reference contains full details of how to use the Date and Categories metadata. When writing posts of more than a paragraph or two in length you should also try the Read more and Summary options.