To much to read? check out the code here

Background

I wanted to share different cool things I know, read, or watch on YouTube, and for that, I needed a place to share it, dev.to or medium.com came into my mind but I needed something more personal and this is an excuse for another personal project!

Things I needed in the blog site

aka requirements

• Solid SEO
• Small bundle size
• Server-side rendered (for the most part anyways)
• Easy to add content
• Analytics

The tech-stack

I ended up using Next js (frontend framework), tailwind (CSS library), content layer (content manager), and Highstorm (Analytics) for various reasons so lets discuss them

Design

So let's go through all the things I picked and why

Next js

First it's the default framework that I am using now, but most importantly it gives me SSR and that I really wanted, as I want the site to be quick and the content is static anyways (advantage of not using some CMS).

Tailwind

Again the default CSS framework for me, but with Shadcn UI this becomes even more powerful, as I don't need to build basic components from the ground up.

Content layer

Now for this, I needed a solution that is not hosted somewhere else like a CDN, in a nutshell I needed something completely offline and with no additional request over the wire. Additionally I used MDX ie mark down with JSX for extra flexibility

Highstorm

Simple, open-source, free, and have integration with Slack. (not very powerful but)

Project Structure

The project stucture is a pretty common Next 14 project structure

Publishing new content

For this, I wanted the flow not to make me spin up my local environment for a preview, so I created 2 branches in git one for the main site and one for preview, so I could easily use GitHub to add new pages, and then commit that which will trigger deploy over the preview domain, from where I can easily preview my content and then promote that to the main branch for the prod deployment.

I think this could be very useful for bigger projects too as you can make the main branch protected and have writers commit in the preview branch after which it can be promoted to the main branch. The other thing that I like about this is all the content is owned by me and I can migrate it easily to other formate or sites in the future just one less thing to worry about.

Flow

Content -> Commit in Draft branch

Commit in Draft branch -> Triggers build on preview site

PR to main branch -> Triggers build on main site