Daily Floss: Let’s make a Blog
these are daily now... deal with it
So after much soul searching I have discovered the project we will be working on together, a blog website. Now, I know what you are thinking “but you already have a Tumblr” or “if you don’t like Tumblr use another free site.” I thought the same way, then I decided this is a learning opportunity for all of us I don’t want to pass up. So, if you just want to watch and keep your old blog, that’s perfectly fine, but I will be enjoying leaving the Tumblr life behind. Let’s not tarry any longer.
Let’s start with the first question, how do you make a blog? Well, it turns out that there is this wonderful Node.js library/framework for just this sort of thing called Ghost(their home page is a little obnoxious, so let’s not look passed GitHub). Of course we are Developers so let’s go directly to the dev install instructions, make sure you have Node.js installed.
WOW, that was a little too easy.
For those of you just reading here is a screenshot of it running locally.
Hmmmm, I sort of wanted to build the thing myself, not run a couple commands and have a free website.
NEW DIRECTION. I am gonna get my hands a little dirtier and begin from scratch, then share it with all of you. First, I’ll start with dev-ops stuff and go from there. Maybe we will use Gulp this time instead of Grunt.
Before you go though, let me tell you a little more about Ghost. Even though we won’t be using it, it is a very nice tool made by some nice people.
Ghost offers a “pro” service which, given a monthly fee, will manage a blog page on a Digital Ocean server. It also has a free version of a similar service. The Ghost team put together an nmp module to be used as well if you don’t feel like cloning their repo and building it yourself. Behind the scenes Ghost is built using Express(I’ll tackle this when we build our own blog) and Ember.js(an MVC framework). All this awesomeness is wrapped up in a freeing MIT license so you may do what you want with it.
Sorry I did not go more in depth into Ghost itself, I really just wanted to set the stage for our future blog engine. I do recommend checking it out if you are interested in Node.js projects.
Next time, I’ll have the beginnings of a repo for you all to fork.