I'm still of the firm opinion that a blog on Ghost is a great option for most people. It works with very little maintenance; Letsencrypt is built into the CLI tool so it's very easy to get SSL; the editing experience is great; images are optimized for sizes; custom theming is possible; and if don't want Ghost to render your pages, you can hook into the API and use it as a headless CMS. I use Ghost for every blog I run as well as the marketing pages for my apps.
The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
221–230 of 275 posts
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
This meme is tedious. Typescript is here to stay. No question. React has been a thing now for what, six years? And it feels like 80% of FE job opening require React. And no major shift on the horizon.
Six years, roughly the time it took Angular to rise until version 2. Sorry for the sarcasm, I've been trying to learn web development for some months, starting with the basics (HTML, CSS, plain JS) and slowly adding more modern frameworks (Bootstrap, NodeJS, ...). The course is a few years old already and it feels like 80% of what I learn is now completely irrelevant. I just wonder how frontend developers keep up wit…
"I just wonder how frontend developers keep up with that pace."
Understand the principles behind these frameworks, see that they hit just some point between conflicting tradeoffs, understand problem domains and how they interact with these tradeoffs. It's not like jQuery is accomplishing something fundamentally different than React, it's just that they make wildly different design choices that have implications on composability, maintainability, etc.
After you've learned a few of these (and the principles they are built on top of), you'll understand that it's going to be pretty easy to learn the next 10 of them.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#223Yet, here I am, currently setting up a static blog using Publish: https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this. I'm all in on Markdown and other ASCII-readable formats. By all means, render out to HTML to make things pretty, but consider keeping the source in plain text. You can browse my personal site with curl or even netcat: curl https://anderspitman.net/txt/19 nc txt.anderspitman.net 3838 <<< /txt/19
Web browsers are terrible plain text readers. Especially mobile browsers. The problems are manifold. If your plain text document has line breaks to enforce some column width it will rarely match a browser's viewport width. This means the browser will break lines to fit in the viewport but still respect line breaks. So you get lines broken by the viewport and then line breaks a few words later. The text does not flow…
No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.
Idk, maybe we should revive the world of information served raw over TCP or telnet. HTTP is out of control.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#225Strange that no one has commented this yet, but most (all?) of his "choices" are a blueprint of the official "Create a Next.js App" tutorial at https://nextjs.org/learn/basics/create-nextjs-app
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This meme is tedious. Typescript is here to stay. No question. React has been a thing now for what, six years? And it feels like 80% of FE job opening require React. And no major shift on the horizon.
When did you start web development? Serious question. We went through all the ‘here to stay’ a few times over already. Cordova, Bootstrap, Backbone, Coffeescript, Angular, Grunt, Gulp, Require.js/AMD, I think we already moved into and out of React Native lol, that whole Mongo thing, everyone had to be a D3 expert almost at one point, isomorphic apps almost became the thing - Meteor, they were all here to stay.
I'm not a webdev, but TypeScript has an appeal for me. I think one thing that clearly separates it from others is tooling. VS Code, love it or hate it, is an enabler and currently it works great with TS, both are Microsoft products. Also TypeScript _is_ JavaScript with types augmentation. In this manner it is from worse-is-better school of thought which almost always leads to a long time leader.
All technologies you listed were either a framework or something that made you bend your solution around it. For comparison you can add a type annotation to your vanilla JS code to start using TS goodies.
Comparison to Closure Compiler would be more fitting, but it was a bit awkward and it never achieved a significant fraction of TS's adoption. It probably is still used, but there is no competition between them. Also it never had as good an IDE.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#227Why reinvent the wheel? Use Wordpress/Ghost etc
Aren't Wordpress and Ghost heavy in a way that it has some number of CSS/JS that we don't need?
You can write your own theme still. I wrote my own. Mine serves 2.6kB for CSS and 16kB for app-specific javascript--mostly for highlighting of code blocks
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#228I'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…
If I was commissioned to make someone a blog site , quite frankly I would just install Wordpress and call it a day.
You'd be missing out, tbh.
Going down the JAM stack route provides a number of opportunities to improve on many of technical aspects common to the development of a CMS backed website.
For a start, you'll miss out on opportunities cheaper hosting with 'serverless' deployment. But I think the chance to decouple the frontend from the backend is valuable enough, fwiw.
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#229I really think the negativity in the comments here is overblown, and misdirected. The author has a totally reasonable set of requirements: React + TypeScript, writing posts in Markdown, small amounts of interactability, and static site generation. It may be an indictment of the JavaScript ecosystem and the current state of the web that nothing exists that can help the user accomplish this out of the box, but that doe…
This is so ridiculous coming from someone that did front end during the pre SPA days. I don’t event know where to start here . It’s a blog, not a complicated backend solution requiring a stack like this. Just throw in something simple to get the posts from the database and update the dates and you’re done . It’s over engineered and symptomatic of major issues in the front end community.
I'd recommend not being so quick to dismiss the author. Your suggested alternative is actually way more complex. The approach described sets up a static site generator that allows for deployment to a static asset webhost (like S3/CloudFront). What this means are that there is no server to administrate or manage. Aside from the cost and performance advantages, this drastically simplifies the operational overhead. There's nothing to patch, no networking to configure, nothing. Just upload and be done. Moreover, there's no database at all either. No need to manage database credentials, no need to pay the costs to keep a database running, no need to patch a database server, etc...
This is the total opposite of overengineering. The stack the author is running is way simpler than one where you have to spin up a webserver, database, caching solution, etc...
Re: The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this. I'm all in on Markdown and other ASCII-readable formats. By all means, render out to HTML to make things pretty, but consider keeping the source in plain text. You can browse my personal site with curl or even netcat: curl https://anderspitman.net/txt/19 nc txt.anderspitman.net 3838 <<< /txt/19
Web browsers are terrible plain text readers. Especially mobile browsers. The problems are manifold. If your plain text document has line breaks to enforce some column width it will rarely match a browser's viewport width. This means the browser will break lines to fit in the viewport but still respect line breaks. So you get lines broken by the viewport and then line breaks a few words later. The text does not flow…
> If you want a plain text website just make it HTML with a minimal or no stylesheet
I have an HTML version of my blog for people who want to read it in browsers.
> No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.
No one is going to read my blog, period.