Creating a block using views is pretty straightforward. You could create a block to display a list of published articles or ones that have been promoted to the front page. Then you can add that block into any theme region.
But you may encounter a situation where you no longer have any articles which are published and then you end up with an empty block.
Views comes with a feature that allows you to hide a block if no results are returned and this is what will be covered in this tutorial.