About This Website

technology

I could have used a typical wordpress or google blogger to write a blog, but as the porpuse of this site is not to be a simple blog, but also to act as a test bed for some randon experimet, I’ve preferred to code it from scratch. It has been created from the generator-gulp-angular, a very good Yeoman generator for AngularJS with GulpJS. I’ve used this generator in different projects as it is a piece of cake to work with.

To kick off a new project, if you don’t already have the JS ecosystem simply install it with npm install -g yo gulp bower. Then run

npm install -g generator-gulp-angular
yo gulp-angular my-new-owesome-app

After that you just run

gulp serve

and it will start a web server and open a browser on the main page. The browser is synchronized with your project folder, so every time you change a file, it will refresh the page automatically. The pages served are not minimized and therefore easy to debug. Running

gulp

will minimize the code which you can deploy wherever you want.

#hosting It is deployed in GitHub pages as it is free and famouse to be very fast. Instead of pushing the files that I want to publish by hand in a gh-pages branch, I share this code in master and publish it using the gulp plugin gulp-gh-pages which can be installed with

npm install --save-dev gulp-gh-pages

and adding this code in your gulpfile.js

var ghPages = require('gulp-gh-pages');

gulp.task('publish', ['build'], function() {
  return gulp.src('./dist/**/*')
    .pipe(ghPages());
});

it allows me to deploy on GitHub with a simple

gulp publish

articles

The articles are simple html templates included in the main page with a ng-include. The file articles.constants.js contains the list of articles, the templates and some other meta data describing the articles. In a future this file will come from some sort of noSql DB.