Bryan can you provide feedback if any here where I forced the exclude param to be an Array? My thinking was that since Sphinx accepts an array to exclude multiple objects from a search, I'd need to somehow tack on an array of blog articles to an already instantiated array somewhere here. This is also what lead me to check whether I'm handling an array or single object in the exclude params in the content method - but if I force the @category.featured_articles.first on line 82 to be an array like I did on 67 then I wouldn't need those checks. My concern is that remembering what kind of data structure you need to pass here seems too rigid and inextensible.