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The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

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Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#91

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

johnrackles wrote: post #46

Earning my daily bread with writing React with TypeScript and using next.js, this is exactly what I would use for my personal blog. Sorry for the many negative comments. I'm not sure if many people here do websites for a living, but I can't imagine doing stuff any other way anymore. It's just so convinient from a developer standpoint. Is it overkill for some websites? Maybe, but in the end you are dead on with your s…

> I'm not sure if many people here do websites for a living

I'll hazard a guess at >90%.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#92

Post by microcolonel »

frereubu wrote: post #48
NewEntryHN wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It becomes more complicated as soon as a you have a sidebar with "Last articles" in which case you would need to edit each single HTML files to edit the sidebar consistently. Even with a single archives page you need to think about updating the archive for each new article. Also Markdown is definitely more author-friendly than HTML, but that's more like an extra.

If you're using Apache, which he said he was, you can just use server-side includes: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_include.html#e...

Another option is to use cat and a shell script or Makefile, or I guess some people use m4.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#94

Post by dynamite-ready »

I'm quite surprised by the negativity here. If I was commissioned to make a custom blog site for someone, I would probably go down this route, and use a headless CMS to make it easier for others to generate content. But using plain markdown is not a bad choice if you can't be bothered with, or can't afford a server.

With the stack described as I understand it, the front-end flexibility is preferable to what the likes of what WordPress will give you, and the stack will allow a developer to decouple the CMS backend from whatever plans he or she has for the frontend.

I suppose one can complain about React all they like. I'm not the biggest fan of React, but component based rendering has it's advantages, so I can't see the issue with that choice.

The only thing I don't like, is 'JS all the way down'... Not because I hate the language (I think the language is fine, and TypeScript is overrated). But just because I'm still not quite sure what the effect on SEO and accessibility might be, when developers go 'full JS'.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#95

Post by p410n3 »

jamesu wrote: post #30

My main problem with blogging is not really the tech stack itself, but rather getting into the flow to consistently write and complete stuff. Every slip-up which happens on the way from brain to page drastically reduces the chance something will get published. e.g. troubleshooting a broken deployment script because something broke after an update? -> no post. needing to manually manipulate images? -> no post. page re…

The image thing is big for me. You can literall tell when I switched from a handwritten site to a CMS as soon as started to include images.

I definitely wanted to use srcset to serve a performant website, but i was too lazy to do that manually or to make a script for it.

Now it doesnt matter anymore :)

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#96

Post by gonzo41 »

indigochill wrote: post #42
mhh__ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't all of that done client side i.e. still possible with a static site?

Yes. You can go crazy with static sites. I use Github Pages for this. On one I've done a single-page Javascript-driven text adventure. On another I've embedded a Unity application that runs a dynamic 3D starmap with WebGL. I've also seen roguelikes. What you can't do is run server-side logic, but you can do an -awful- lot on the client.

When workplaces were still slowly still migrating to GIT, we had Git and SVN.

SVN rocked because you could run static sites in it, a little bit of jquery and whatever and I was building a ton of simple business productivity tool as single page apps. All with the peralta guarantee of support.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#97

Post by ldeangelis »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #94

I'm quite surprised by the negativity here. If I was commissioned to make a custom blog site for someone, I would probably go down this route, and use a headless CMS to make it easier for others to generate content. But using plain markdown is not a bad choice if you can't be bothered with, or can't afford a server. With the stack described as I understand it, the front-end flexibility is preferable to what the likes…

I think with Next you can "build" the website (the HTML for each page is generated like it would be if it was executed in your browser) and then serve the static HTML + JS if needed, which makes for good SEO.

Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020

#99

Post by dbergamin »

nickjj wrote: post #20
ferros wrote: post #5

Personally I work in tech all day, I want my blog to be as simple as possible and to focus just on my writing. Still using Jekyll.

I use Jekyll too. It just works and I'd happily use it on future projects. Even with ~300 posts and ~100 drafts it only takes 2 seconds to see auto-reloaded updates when I'm actively writing. That's within WSL 1 too (room for speed improvements are there with WSL 2). It also has nice plugins to process SCSS and bundle your CSS / JS, along with md5 tagging all static files for cache busting without having to use Webpa…

Another Jekyll fan chiming in. It was a good sign for me that it's not super-actively maintained, yet still commands a strong following in an arena with fairly low switching costs. Out of the box, it has most things you want and very little that you don't.

Principle 1 on the Jekyll philosophy is 'no magic', and that's why I love it. It tends to behave as expected, and what it provides is simple enough that I maintain a feeling of full control over the output. I've wrote some little bits of JS to add minor client-side enhancements, and the Jekyll plugin system is easy to dive into if you want to add some site-render features. Great tool.

Kudos to the author for putting something up for discussion. Replace the word 'The' with 'My' in the title and it's a nice exploration of where React tooling for static sites is at.

Keep publishing and sharing mate, you're good at telling a story and have more good content ahead of you.

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