= Nex3 Blogging Engine

Yes, I named it after my own alias.
I didn't anticipate that other people would want to use it.
In fact, as far as I know, only one other person _does_ want to use it.
If I'm wrong and you're not that person (you'll know if you are),
shoot me an email at nex342@gmail.com.
I'm always interested to know if people are using my stuff.

Assuming that only a few people are using this, though,
I'm not going to be very keen on making UI improvements
for nitty-gritty administrative stuff.
I mean, I want to streamline posting and such,
but getting it set up will require mucking around in script/console.
If you want to change the behavior, hack the source.
That sort of thing.

So what's cool about this engine? I really don't know.
I pretty much made it for fun.
I haven't used other blogging frameworks,
but to the best of my knowledge this doesn't have any features they don't.
I guess you could call it minimalistic,
but I'm not really going out of my way to keep it simple.
I pretty much just add features as I want them.

At the moment I'm writing this, it does comes with a few reasonably useful features.
For those curious for a brief rundown, I'll list them here,
although I don't by any means guarantee that this list will be kept up-to-date.

* You can post posts, or articles, or whatever you want to call them.
  Shoving stuff up on the front page in an orderly manner.
  This is a pretty important one for a blog.

* Other people (and you) can comment on your shoved stuff.
  Start up a conversation of sorts.
  Not as important, I guess, but still lots of fun.

* You and your commenty buddies can preview your text.
  Definitely useful if you use the built-in textile formatting for your text.
  It's nice that it's human-readable and stuff,
  but you can never really tell how the parser'll do on those edge cases.

* Folks can get updated when you post something.
  Well, it's Atom-based, so really they can update themselves.
  But it all looks the same to the user.

* There's this sleek-looking live search.
  All AJAXy and stuff. Or non-AJAXy if you don't have Javascript.
  Anyway, you can look through your posts for stuff.

* You can use Akismet to beat off the spam.
  This is a new one. I don't really know how well it works yet,
  but Akismet's supposed to be good.
  We'll see.

== Setting Up

Yeah, it's a bit of a pain to set up.
But hey, it's O(1).
You'll live.

So, first of all, get all the gems you need.
If I'm remembering everything,
this means redcloth, rcov, and coderay at the moment.
Everything else comes in plugins.

Next up, set up config/database.yml.
This should be pretty straightforward.
Make the databases, set the right socket location, etc.

Then run +rake db:migrate+.
Get all those tables set up.

You might want to run the specs.
I encourage it.
Just do +rake rspec+.
Everything should pass, or maybe be marked as "pending."
If something fails, let me know.

Finally, you need to set up the admin user.
There's no way to do this with a GUI,
so fire up script/console.
Enter the following,
with the appropriate replacements:

  u = User.new
  u.name = <username>
  u.password = <password>
  u.password_confirm = <password>
  u.admin = true

After this, the site should be up and running.
On my layout, which I suppose will be the default,
you can sign in by clicking that character in the upper right-hand corner.

Once you sign in, you'll notice a few more links on the sidebar.
These allow you to do fun administrative stuff,
like create new posts and muck with users and log out.

At this point, you might want to click the users icon
and give yourself a link and an email.

Once that's all done, start posting.
If you're feeling particularly generous, link back to me.
If not, well, at least enjoy the engine.

== Configuration

Most of the configuration is done by getting your hands dirty.
Mess with the code, change up the layout, that sort of thing.

However, for common stuff, there's config/nex3.yml.
This contains some variables you can set.
It should be pretty self-explanitory.