For a few years now, I've been watching my friends in the web development community write highly informative and well researched articles on their personal blogs, or as contributing authors writing articles for the blogs of their friends and colleagues. If I may be so bold as to say, the articles are of high quality and important resources for web developers worldwide.

It got me thinking about how unfortunate it is to have all this great material scattered all over the Internet with no easy means of discovery, or of finding the articles after a long period of time. I thought to myself, "How awesome would it be to create one place, one blog, that acts as a central hub for my friends and me to post about web technology. It would make it easier for interested people to find the articles, create a visible association between the people posting on the blog, identify the individual voices of each author, and would expose the writers of the posts to a larger audience."

Birth

I've had this idea brewing in my mind since the beginning of the year and it just took a hold of me. I knew it must happen somehow. Because of my other side projects, and because I hadn't asked any of my web developer friends what they thought about my idea, I was hesitant to execute it on my own.

Then, at the Smashing Conference in September of this year, I had a long conversation with Hans aka. @drublic about my thoughts on the topic at hand; it turns out, I am not the only one who thinks it's a great idea to have a central hub for developers to share and post articles, discuss recent technological advancements, and share ideas.

So, cutting a long story short, we decided to execute on the desire to create a central hub for developers, hence The Nitty Gritty (TNG) was born and now we are about to wake this beast up. We think it has a lot of potential.

Constructing the Blog

Hans and I built TNG together using Kirby, modern front-end technologies and a build process powered by the current alpha version of Grunt.js. Although neither of us are designers, I think we put together a decent looking blog. Hans set up Kirby initially and I put together a color palette on colorlovers.com (a great tip from @holman). Hans then carefully crafted the overall look of the site sticking to the Mobile First approach using Sass and I built the logo with web fonts and CSS as well.

The fonts we use are Merriweather for headlines and Open Sans for copy text.

Why The Nitty Gritty?

First off, both Hans and I are not fans of names that are too literal for niche blogs, like "The Web Tech Blog," or something along those lines. But we still wanted the name to relate to what we are trying to accomplish here.

The definition of "Nitty Gritty" is

what is essential and basic : specific practical details

– Merriam Webster Dictionary

And since this is a place for articles that explore web tech subjects in-depth, it is the perfect name for it.

Upcoming

We currently have some great authors writing articles for TNG, including the performance pope Schepp, Yeoman core contributor Sindre Sorhus, and the maker of Kirby, Bastian Allgeier. Also, look out for a great article on CSS decoupling by TNG's very own @drublic coming online tomorrow.

Of course we have a long wish list of authors we will be contacting over the next few days and months to get more high quality stuff on the blog.

But we also want to encourage anyone who would like to publish their work on TNG to send us a pitch at pitch@thenittygritty.co. All we want to do is publish well researched articles about web tech and related topics. Contact us!

We really hope that TNG can become an important resource for web developers all over the planet. Spread the word and help us wake that gorilla up!