A bit of context for our VuePress project

What’s this side project I’m talking about? Well, it started with a pain any blog editor or webmaster knows too well:

Cringe-worthy outreach emails.

You know the kind of email that praises your blog content and offers some guest posts about real estate… on a WEB DEVELOPMENT platform?!

We thought it was time to put a spotlight on this stinky marketing technique. To do so, we built a simple Hugo static site where anyone can publish anonymous and funny examples of how not to outreach. The name of the site? Outreach Shame.

Note: Outreach Shame isn’t live yet, but it presented us with a good use case to build VuePress documentation. You’ll find real guidelines in the documentation we created (link further down). Follow them to send us your lousy outreach examples; they’ll appear on the site once it goes live.

What is VuePress?

In a few words, VuePress is a minimalistic Vue-powered static site generator.

As mentioned earlier, the original goal behind its design was to generate documentation, but its system also allows you to write a theme for almost anything.

I’ve read in a few places that VuePress is not blog-aware yet. Although it does miss some blogging features out-of-the-box, it’s still well-suited for simple blogs, as you’ll see later on.

VuePress is only a few months old but has already made some waves mainly because it comes directly from the brain behind Vue.js. Let’s see what the man has to say about VuePress:

“It’s special in the sense that it completely uses Vue for its layout and because Vue is a frontend framework it’s actually using a few server-side rendering capabilities to do the static HTML generation. The result is, when you write your layout or your theme for a VuePress site it’s actually a universal application that runs both on the server and on the client.”

The server is skipped though, and every route of the app is virtually rendered to generate static HTML files that load as a Vue.js single page application.

Why should you use VuePress?

As you’re probably aware, there are tons of static site generators out there. So where does VuePress stand out?

→ Its unique use of Markdown & Vue components

VuePress handles the conversion of Markdown to HTML by default which makes generating new content very easy. You can even use Vue components directly in your Markdown files. It allows you to add custom or dynamic features to your website smoothly. Other built-in Markdown features include a YAML front-matter to set predefined variables or create custom ones that VuePress will automatically interpret.

→ Its multi-language support from the get-go

Out-of-the-box, VuePress lets you write several versions of your site in as many languages as you need. (!)

→ Its neat default & custom themes

The least I can say is that the VuePress default theme looks clean. It’ll do the job for any fast implementation of technical documentation. It’s responsive & fully-featured (search capabilities, navbar & sidebar, optional homepage, etc.). Then, customizing the default theme or starting from scratch is simple and fun.

#vuepress #vue #programming