Example Blog Layout and Tutorial

Starting a blog to share your new coding knowledge with the world? Use this tutorial to get started.

Made with:

• Yeoman
• generator-browserify
• Zurb Foundation
• Blog Template

Other Technologies Used

• Grunt
• NPM
• Sass (SCSS)
• SVG (Headshot image of me)
• svgo (npm install -g svgo)

Tutorial

Prerequisites

• Node and NPM installed.
• I recommend brew install nvm on Mac OS X instead of brew install node. See the nvm README for more details.
• Yeoman and Grunt installed: npm install -g yo grunt-cli

How I made this app

Grab my copy of generator-browserify (until this pull request is closed).

npm -g install ivanoats/generator-browserify.git

Generate the app skeleton

mkdir blog && cd blog
yo browserify

• Choose Grunt as the build system.
• Choose Foundation as the front-end framework.
• Yes, you’d like to include Modernizr to support your grand-dad on IE8.
• No, let’s skip Jade templating for now.
• Choose Libsass as the Sass compiler so that you don’t need a Ruby dependency in your project

You’ll see a lot of text scroll by, and on my system I saw the last lines like this:

grunt-sass@0.9.0 node_modules/grunt-sass
├── async@0.2.10
└── node-sass@0.7.0 (node-watch@0.3.4, colors@0.6.0-1, mkdirp@0.3.5, optimist@0.6.1, mocha@1.13.0)

Your directory listing should look something like this:

total 80
drwxr-xr-x   13 ivan  staff    442 Apr 17 12:40 .
drwxr-xr-x  256 ivan  staff   8704 Apr 17 12:36 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff     42 Apr 16 15:14 .bowerrc
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff    214 Apr 16 15:14 .editorconfig
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff     11 Apr 16 15:14 .gitattributes
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff     65 Apr 16 15:14 .gitignore
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff    390 Apr 16 15:14 .jshintrc
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff  11094 Apr 17 12:40 Gruntfile.js
drwxr-xr-x    7 ivan  staff    238 Apr 17 12:40 app
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff    213 Apr 16 15:14 bower.json
drwxr-xr-x    2 ivan  staff     68 Apr 17 12:40 dist
drwxr-xr-x   32 ivan  staff   1088 Apr 17 12:40 node_modules
-rw-r--r--    1 ivan  staff   1277 Apr 17 12:40 package.json

Now type grunt serve to launch the app in a web browser. You should see something like this:

That’s great but let’s start with a simpler blog layout: Go to Foundation HTML Templates and download the blog layout HTML. Put that in the body tag of app/index.html in your project.

You can now start customizing your blog with the following files:

• app/index.html
• app/scss/app.scss
• app/images

Here’s what I did:

Go to town! This generator also includes BackboneJS so you can even make your blog a single-page app.

Contributing

Tested Pull-Requests welcome! I will list you as a contributor.