Whether you are building your own blog or a site for a client it is important to remember to build things in a way that allow you to reuse your code. This is otherwise known as the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself).
While this principle has been common practice in the world of backend development, it hasn’t been around as long in front end development. This is partly due to the lack of development tools up until recently, that allow someone to implement this principle in a practical way.
Thanks to the growing popularity of preprocessors we can accomplish doing a lot more with less time invested and generally with a great degree of consistency and quality. I happen to use GruntJS in my workflow but there are plenty of other options out there. Whether you prefer a GUI (http://alphapixels.com/prepros/) or plan to go at it via command line, preprocessors offer a lot in the way of automating keeping your SASS processes, your Javascript linted, your images crunched, and your files concatenated. And thats only the start.
“But wait thats not all! If you act now we will throw in a free boiler plate generator absolutely free!”
You can take things a step further by getting into package management for your dependencies and build scripts that will take care of creating the most ideal starting boiler plate for your project using tools like Yeoman and Bower.
As you have already noticed I haven’t really gone into the details of using these tools. Each one of these tools is a post on to itself, so consider this more of a preview of posts to come.
Tell me about your favorite tools and workflows in the comments below and I will try to incorporate those into future comparisons on in depth posts.