Promoting Grunt?

[cowboy]

How can we better promote Grunt?

I, along with @sindresorhus and @kahlil, who emailed us recently, have a few ideas.

We should:

• Tweet more consistently.
• Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc.
• Create our own tutorials, screencasts, guides.
• Adjust docs to address community questions or misunderstandings.
• Respond to StackOverflow questions tagged gruntjs.
• Respond to relevant community comments, in general.

What else?

[kahlil]

🐗 👍

Having the list above addressed in a thorough way would be a great base to start off of I think.

❤️

[cowboy]

I think a good starting point would be to take each bullet item one-by-one and propose content ideas. Like what tutorials or screencasts should we create? Etc.

[sindresorhus]

Tweet more consistently.
Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc.

Maybe some way to allow people to submit suggestions and encourage they doing so.

We could have a weekly/bi-weekly digest post that is a collection of @grunt tweets, community efforts and other things happening.

Adjust docs to address community questions or misunderstandings.

I think the most important thing we can do here is to move all the docs to the grunt-docs repo so people can file tickets/PRs.

Respond to StackOverflow questions tagged gruntjs.

Recommend people following the tag to help out. It's not clear that you can do that. We need more people helping each other out and answering questions.

---

// @cowboy can you tweet about this ticket from @gruntjs?

[cowboy]

RT http://twitter.com/gruntjs/status/385064878660395008

[bevacqua]

How about a newsletter?

[sindresorhus]

@bevacqua if we go for a weekly digest post it could be both. But, we need someone willing to maintain it.

[Sequoia]

case studies, i.e. "so-and-so is using grunt to do XYZ- here's how"

[pfulton]

I would love to see more tutorials and blog posts about how Grunt benefits the "common" front-end dev. Perhaps a "why would I use this?" series.

[creativeaura]

I think a weekly digest with new trick and tips with useful tasks will be very helpful to developers. Or a live coding session on Hangout to show the best way to use it.

[thomasboyt]

How about Railscast-style screencasts (with text tutorials, if it's not too much extra work) that spotlight different Grunt tasks? Definitely want to show off the giant ecosystem :)

[mattdsteele]

Maybe evangelism swag? I'd love to have a Grunt sticker on my laptop; so when someone asks about it I can tell them the good news.

[isimmons]

"Create our own tutorials, screencasts, guides" <-- this
I'm not ashamed to say that "yes I want someone to hold my hand and walk me through the entire process" :-) Of course hand holding is not a requirement. I'll learn to use it anyway. But it definitely increases peoples willingness to dig in and then they start advocating for it.

[davidjgoss]

To expand on what @pfulton said, there's a feeling among many front-end developers and designers who are not so technically hardcore that tools like Grunt are over the top, cleverness for its own sake etc. This is a shame, and perhaps some content could be targeted at these people to encourage them to give it a try.

[bevacqua]

@mattdsteele stickers 👍

I agree screencasts would be very helpful.

Also, how about decoupling ourselves from Node? That would allow us to reach people who aren't using Node. I'm just talking about providing a stand-alone bundle, or something along those lines, for non-noders

[addyosmani]

Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc

The common things I see front-enders new to Grunt trying to do include:

• Getting started (Gruntfile, package.json)
• Adding a linter
• Integrating a CSS preprocessor (Sass, Less)
• Starting a local server
• Live reload (maybe)
• Running tests
• Housekeeping (clean, best practices for matchdep etc)
• Deployment

It would be nice to see a set of tutorials or docs cover these. You'd be surprised at how often people simply don't read the READMEs nor grasp how easy it is to get some of this stuff setup. Complimentary screencasts showing each of these steps in a short, but clear way could also be helpful.

For more advanced users, cover how you can improve build performance/times. Things like how to concurrently run tasks, only run those tasks where files have changed (grunt-newer) etc.

Big plus one on more tweets. When it comes to recommending what tasks to tweet include some context. Why is this something you might want to use? How does it help? etc.

I'm more than happy to try helping with some of this.

[popkinj]

I first heard about Grunt at a conference. Now I use it every day.

As far as developers go... It's hard to beat the amount of exposure you get then at a massive event. I would think more talks or courses at html5dev or jsconf would greatly improve popularity.

[geekdave]

It would be great to have a "popularity" metric on the Grunt Plugins page. Oftentimes, there are many competing plugins that all claim to solve the same problem.

The last modified date already helps to weed out abandoned plugins. But perhaps a popularity metric based on "Github Stars" would help, as well. Projects with more stars could rise to the top.

I do realize that not all plugins are hosted on Github, so maybe this would unfairly penalize such projects. Maybe there's a way to infer popularity from several different sources?

[artyomtrityak]

Predefined configs will add more developers. They will be able to start with them and then customize

[poeticninja]

I agree with @addyosmani on the individual items Grunt can do. When I started with Grunt I was finding really large Grunt files, go through the whole thing, and understanding what was going on just to take only one piece. I think if there was a Github repo for each item, showing the Grunt file and folder structure it would help really simplify peoples understanding of how it works.

The other thing would be a tips newsletter or blog. Showing something cool someone did. Maybe even categories based on skill level. Becuase Grunt "can" be easy, but it can also be very complex when you get good at it.

[isimmons]

Though reading the docs is the best way this outlines a good reason for in depth explanations of even the simple things. https://gist.github.com/isimmons/6781336

[artyomtrityak]

off-topic, deleted by @cowboy

[cowboy]

@isimmons what you wrote is helpful, but only partly. Can you propose a solution to the problem?

[Sharondio]

I like the idea of "Use Case" based tutorials...with Grunt used to solve only one or two specific problems at a time. I think newbies get overwhelmed when they see huge gruntFiles and Grunt secretly running the federal government via plug-ins...oh wait....

Seriously though, I believe the target audience is someone lower level than most docs/tutorials assume. All the "wicked smaht and cool" kids are already using Grunt, or they have good reasons to be using something else. There is a lot of potential growth from the segment new to JS and even automated workflow processes.

Also, by making tutorials much smaller and more narrowly focused, it's easier for people to squeeze in a 3-7 minute screencast to answer a specific problem and move on with their day than try to find time to watch and absorb a 40-90 minute video covering end to end. Egghead.io is using this tactic to great success with teaching Angular.

[joefiorini]

Better discoverability of plugins. I was thinking about changing the plugins page to show popular and new plugins, kind like sindresorhus.com/bower-components/.

[isimmons]

@cowboy People like @addyosmani advocating/evangelizing and writing tutorials is the best way in my opinion. A while back there was a course on nettuts which I bet doesn't work any more http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/meeting-grunt-the-build-tool-for-javascript/

Since changes in how grunt, grunt-cli, and individual contribs work in recent months, I think a session on nettuts, or full course on tutsplus would do a lot to promote Grunt and who ever is willing to put in the work could get paid as a nettuts/tutsplus author. Consider how Laravel blew up in popularity because of people like Jeffrey Way showing people how to use it.

Basically the list by @addyosmani above outlines the main things newbs and designers are trying to do with grunt.

As @thomasboyt mentioned above, a rails-casts like site would work too. I'd pay a fee for advanced topics if the basics were free.

But most important IMHO to newby understanding is full build walk throughs with explanations of each part.

[kahlil]

The Grand Grunt Master Promo Plan

Wow, so cool! All this input is very helpful in order to paint a picture of where the actual pain points are concerning Grunt documentation and learning.

There seems to be a great need to document Grunt from a very basic level upwards.

Here is what I think we need to do/can do broken down point by point using @benalmans initial list up top as a guide.

Tweet more consistently.

Here is what can be done:

• Monitor Twitter searches for keywords like: grunt, gruntjs, gruntplugin, gruntfile, gruntfile.js etc. and jump in and communicate. Either lend a helping hand or just fav a tweet, or just say thanks to a nice big up.
• Scower the web for blog posts, screencasts and other third-party content about Grunt. Tweet about it if it is any good. Maybe even contact the author and consider republishing it on the Grunt.js blog if the quality is right.
• Tweet out any new articles, tutorials from the Grunt.js blog
• Tweet out short Grunt tips
• Tweet funny animates gifs of boars running through the woods
• Give a shout-out to a cool gruntplugin
• Monitor the gruntplugin tag on npm and link to intersting new gruntplugins
• Ask for screencast and tutorial suggestions
• Ask for community contributions
• Monitor the gruntjs tag on Stackoverflow
• Promote Stackoverflows gruntjs tag
• Tweet out questions tagged with gruntjs
• Ask the community to get involved on Stackoverflow
• Encourage/remind people to put their Grunt questions on Stackoverflow and to tag them with gruntjs

Publish regular blog posts highlighting favorite plugins, tutorials, releases, etc.

I think there should definitely be regular "highlight-type" posts about interesting gruntplugins and third-party documentation of Grunt.

@sindresorhus suggestion of the weekly or biweekly digest in form of a blog post & newsletter would be a great addition to that and also a good way to summarize the highlight-posts.

MailChimp has a plugin that can send out weekly newsletters comprised from an RSS feed.

Create our own tutorials, screencasts, guides.

Now this is the most interesting part to me. This is where most of the feedback in this issue comes in.

• Take suggestions from the community
• Build up a content roadmap or content strategy to cover as much ground as possible systematically
• Build up an arsenal of super simple Grunt tutorials
• Build up an arsenal of super simple Grunt screencasts, egghead.io style
• Raise the difficulty-level once the level below is covered
• Dissect complex Gruntfiles step by step maybe in multiple post/screencasts
• Answer the "Why?" question about plugins and tasks
• Document and explain use cases
• Suggest solutions to common problems and facilitate discovery of established plugins for newcomers

Adjust docs to address community questions or misunderstandings.

I like @sindresorhus suggestion to make the docs PRable.

On top of that careful consideration could be given to community suggestions to address certain misunderstandings.

Maybe documentation should be rethought and reorganized with a lower skill-level assumed.

Respond to StackOverflow questions tagged gruntjs.

I love this idea.

Also:

• Promote the gruntjs tag on the website. Maybe even make it a menu item.
• Highlight great questions/answers on the blog
• Link to the great questions/answers on Twitter
• Edit questions and answers for better understanding/learn effect/completeness
• Add questions if needed

Respond to relevant community comments, in general.

Depending on what the community comments are about:

• Create a Github issue for discussion
• Tweet it out for more feedback
• Act as middleman between community and core team to get a quick responses for urgent issues
• Respond to the comments via blog, Github or Twitter
• Report on measures on the blog and in the digest

🐗

[kud]

Being more active on IRC? O:)

[cowboy]

@kud yes, please!

[kahlil]

@kud yes!

[dylang]

grunt-conf

I think hosting a conference shows that this is a serious project with a lot of invested minds on it.

I've interviewed lot of smart successful JS engineers who have heard of Grunt, but haven't given it a try. This might convince them that it's become "mainstream" enough that it's worth at least trying.

[kahlil]

@bevacqua that's true. Both places is fine.

[kahlil]

The content roadmap has moved to the gruntjs.com repo: gruntjs/gruntjs.com#69

[Weyland]

Lets have international 'talk-like-a-grunt' day.

[bevacqua]

Now I just need to create a grunt task that plays a Warcraft 2 Grunt
sound at random.

🐗

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Weyland notifications@github.com wrote:

Lets have international 'talk-like-a-grunt' day.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/926#issuecomment-25703499
.

[kahlil]

In addition to the content roadmap issue yesterday (gruntjs/gruntjs.com#69) I just created a bunch of issues in the gruntjs.com issues list as per my IRC conversation with @cowboy yesterday. Feel free to weigh in.

• Create a new "home" for questions and answers gruntjs.com#70
• Improve http://gruntjs.com/help-resources gruntjs.com#71
• Add instructions on non-code contributions on http://gruntjs.com/contributing  gruntjs.com#72
• Improve http://gruntjs.com/who-uses-grunt gruntjs.com#73
• Put content in a separate repo gruntjs.com#74
• Add categories to the blog gruntjs.com#75

[dylang]

Great collection of tickets @kahlil.

I think there's more we can do to help "promote" Grunt.

How can we better evangelize Grunt?

For example:

• jQuery, Angular, and Wordpress have transitioned to Grunt. What other high-profile open source projects can we, experienced Grunt users, help make the transition?
• @cowboy did an excellent interview with the JavascriptJabber podcast. What other podcasts should he (and other contributors) be guests on?
• Is there some kind of travis-style badge that developers would want in their README.md to "show off" that their project uses Grunt. Hopefully this would be something more useful than just a static Grunt badge, but that could be a start.

[cowboy]

I'm happy to be on podcasts or speak at conferences, schedule permitting!

[pdehaan]

+1 newsletter.
I actually was hoping to do that. I was hoping to just send it out weekly (assuming I can find enough tweets/modules/articles to keep up a regular schedule). The one big questionmark here for me was whether I try setting up a MailChimp account and set up the website and do the infrastructure work, or if I just quit early and talk to @peterc and see if we can just use his newsletter empire. I assume it would be way faster to get this started since he has 18 newsletters already and a few of us could just curate content rather than reinvent the wheel. Plus, having his expertise and network behind us gets us more cross promotion from newsletters like nodeweekly and javascriptweekly. But again, I haven't talked with him to see if he'd even be willing or what the arrangement would be. Heck, I haven't even asked YOU guys for permission to use the Grunt name, so let me know if you need my address for a lovely pre-emptive cease and desist letter. cough
I'm more than happy to transfer the domain name to @cowboy or whomever else.

I registered gruntweekly.com (no site or placeholder yet) and have @gruntweekly Twitter. I installed a copy of Ghost blogging platform locally and was playing with it and seeing if it would work (versus just using WordPress or something super-easy to set up on MediaTemple). I haven't tried playing with Ghost or some other Node.js based blogging platform on Heroku yet to see how far I can get for free.

As for the Twitter account, I was researching how to set up the same bot as npmtweets https://twitter.com/nodenpm and just filter for any module starting with "grunt-". There may be other ways to set up a bot which watches npm repo for new/updated Grunt modules, but I haven't gotten too far down that rabbit hole yet. So far I've only poked around the bot repo https://github.com/bcoe/npm-tweets and think I've found where I could theoretically add a nice regex filter for module names starting with "grunt-".

Also, I created a silly GruntJS flipboard thing since it was easier to read on my iPad or whatever, but it isn't a great web-experience: https://flipboard.com/section/gruntjs-b3l0oj

Another one I was thinking of is using something like http://devswag.com/ to help sell some gear. I spoke with them briefly a while ago when I was trying to convince JSHint to sell stickers through them. I can't remember the details, so I'd need to go through my email archive to see if we print stickers out of pocket and send them to their offices, or if we send them a high quality vector (or whatever) and they print stickers and give us a cut of the profits. If I can find the old emails, I should ping Anton again and offer to help get stickers on that site since everybody loves stickers.

#xoxo

[pdehaan]

Assuming anybody was interested in my previous message...

1. I emailed Peter Cooper (@peterc) and asked if he would be willing to host a GruntJS newsletter.
2. I emailed DevSwag and asked how we could get stickers (and shirts) listed on their site in case people want to buy stickers. I guess my previous email w/ them was from my old work email address.

Another random idea was we could also have an IRC bot (http://rikukissa.github.io/domo/) which posts Grunt content to our IRC channel. Not sure if there is any value in this at all. My one concern with blasting things on Twitter -> IRC -> Newsletter -> Archived on site was that its too many channels. I don't know the best way for people to submit newsletter content to us, but I always feel it's too easy to miss things on IRC. The easiest may be if somebody sends us a Tweet or DM or something since Twitter makes it pretty easy to access those things.

Plus, depending on how the GruntWeekly website comes together, it would be nice to maybe add a section for GruntJS books (or maybe even have a section on GruntJS.com too). I know Belen has a really nice book on GruntJS on LeanPub http://www.belenalbeza.com/books/ and I know of at least one other book in the works.

Anyways, I'll let you know when I hear back from PeterC and DevSwag if you guys think you may want to proceed down any of those avenues.

-peter

[kahlil]

@pdehaan thanks for your initiative. feel free to let us know about the responses to your emails maybe those solutions can be options. For now the newsletter and the swag have a lower priority on the list of things to do for the Grunt community though (see the issues I created above).

Once we have the ability to create categorized blog posts, we can have somebody, for instance @bevacqua and/or you (after content type and quality has been discussed and checked) create Grunt-news-roundups on the blog that then also can be sent out as a newsletter.

It's important to think about where these things are going to live and then do them right 😃

🐗

[kahlil]

@dylang:

jQuery, Angular, and Wordpress have transitioned to Grunt. What other high-profile open source projects can we, experienced Grunt users, help make the transition?

That's a great idea. What would your proposal be on how to proceed? Would you have people contact projects directly and have them work with them directly?

@cowboy did an excellent interview with the JavascriptJabber podcast. What other podcasts should he (and other contributors) be guests on?

I agree, that interview was sick!!! What is your list of podcasts he should be on? Here are some I can think of:

• The Changelog
• Hanselminutes
• The Web Ahead
• The Big Web Show
• Working Draft (It's a great German podcast, but they have English-speaking guests sometimes, like @paulirish was on for their 100th show for instance).

Is there some kind of travis-style badge that developers would want in their README.md to "show off" that their project uses Grunt. Hopefully this would be something more useful than just a static Grunt badge, but that could be a start.

I like this idea! Can you make a concept/proposition for that?

[cowboy]

I love the idea of a "Built with Grunt" mini-badge. That would be super cool!

[kahlil]

@cowboy:

I love the idea of a "Built with Grunt" mini-badge. That would be super cool!

Me too. How about taking the https://nodei.co/ service as inspiration? Really like those badges too.

[dylang]

jQuery, Angular, and Wordpress have transitioned to Grunt. What other high-profile open source projects can we, experienced Grunt users, help make the transition?

That's a great idea. What would your proposal be on how to proceed? Would you have people contact projects directly and have them work with them directly?

Thanks, glad you like the idea.

I was thinking we ask people to submit projects that would be good candidates and contact a couple high profile ones to see if they are interested. I don't have any candidate projects in mind.

[dylang]

I love the idea of a "Built with Grunt" mini-badge. That would be super cool!

I don't know the Photoshop so I created #933.

Me too. How about taking the https://nodei.co/ service as inspiration? Really like those badges too.

I do too, but they've got useful content in them. I'm not sure what we could generate on the fly that would take up that much space.

It would nice to show "Available Tasks" by running something like a custom versions of grunt -h and piping it to a simple svg generator.

[nschonni]

https://github.com/a11yproject/a11yproject.com/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md uses a Issue -> Gist -> PR workflow for their blog posts publishing process. Maybe that could work on the gruntjs.com repo

[kahlil]

https://github.com/a11yproject/a11yproject.com/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md uses a Issue -> Gist -> PR workflow for their blog posts publishing process. Maybe that could work on the gruntjs.com repo

Interesting. What do you think about that @vladikoff?

[cowboy]

The https://nodei.co/ badges are kinda cool, but way too much for this. I'd want something around the same size as a Travis CI badge, so that if someone put them next to one another, they'd line up visually.

Also, maybe a larger one. I don't see the value in listing tasks in an image, or any other stats (at least, not for now).

One of the things @isaacdurazo has on his ever-growing list is to work with me on creating Grunt logo / brand usage guidelines. This could maybe be a part of that effort.

[kahlil]

The https://nodei.co/ badges are kinda cool, but way too much for this. I'd want something around the same size as a Travis CI badge, so that if someone put them next to one another, they'd line up visually.

Also, maybe a larger one. I don't see the value in listing tasks in an image, or any other stats (at least, not for now).

One of the things @isaacdurazo has on his ever-growing list is to work with me on creating Grunt logo / brand usage guidelines. This could maybe be a part of that effort.

Ah, I get it. Cool! Would love to see @isaacdurazo work on this :)

[dylang]

Another problem we have now is that npmjs.org does not track dev-dependencies. This means most Grunt plugins appear to have no projects using them (or very few, thanks to developers accidentally saving Grunt plugins to dependencies instead of dev-dependencies).

For example: Grunt-notify. has only one dependent listed, but many projects in npm are not included because grunt-notify is a dev-dependency..

To begin to fix this problem I've created PR npm/npm-registry-couchapp#122. This will add a dev-dependents view in Couch. Once it's in I'll create a pull request to update the npmjs.org Web UI to show the dev-dependents.

What can we can do to make sure these pull requests are merged in? What other couch views or npm features would be helpful?

[peterc]

@pdehaan Just wanted to let you know I got your e-mail and will responding shortly (and have also read this thread). Thanks!

[cowboy]

FYI everyone, I am working with @kahlil, along with a few people at Bocoup, to develop a full plan for promoting Grunt. If there is something you are interested in doing to promote Grunt, please let us know before doing anything. Feel free to cc me on any emails that get sent around (ben @ bocoup).

I love the idea of a newsletter promoting Grunt. That being said, I really feel that the content that would go out in a newsletter would best help Grunt by being a part of the site. For example, what if we posted a weekly blog post that served as a roundup of cool Grunt-related things that was also syndicated via email? Then that content doesn't get lost in people's inboxes forever.

Regarding stickers, we're currently working with Stickermule to get more printed (they had a printer calibration issue that made them all print out the wrong color). @isaacdurazo is working on a T-shirt and some other cool stuff. So, that's definitely in-progress.

I'm happy to talk about Grunt on podcasts. Feel free to email your favorite podcast and ask them if they'll interview me!

Either way, the enthusiasm in this thread is fantastic! Thanks, everyone, for all the wonderful suggestions.

But now it's time for us to take all these suggestions and formulate a plan. I'm not going to close the issue yet, but I will soon so we can move to a more structured, organized format.

[codylindley]

I've not acted on it yet, but I think a screencasting-blog (gruntjsing.com), where people from the community simply give a run down of what they are doing in a grunt file would be tremendously helpful.

[cowboy]

@codylindley, we're going to include screencasts as part of the site per gruntjs/gruntjs.com#69. Adding user-submitted screencasts will ultimately just require a PR.

[codylindley]

@cowboy - These (what you linked too) are tutorials targeted at mostly newcomers. Which are needed, no question. I think to support the active community, members of the community could submit 5 to 10 minute screencasts simply describing what is occurring in their production grunt.js file. Not in-depth, just educational so everyone can get an idea of the possibilities and flexibility of the plugin architecture, as well as discovering new uses of grunt and new plugins. All of which would be bit-size.

[cowboy]

@codylindley sounds great. Can you add that suggestion to gruntjs/gruntjs.com#69 for @kahlil to see? Thanks!

[codylindley]

Ha. seems @contolini beat me too it. But I will add my two cents.

[bsradcliffe]

Are stickers restocked? I'd love to slap one on my Macbook to promote Grunt and get people asking what it is.

[vladikoff]

We are just gonna try to release a new version for now