Welcome from my new Blog site!
As you guys know my old site was a jekyll based static site that was being hosted on Github Pages. Actually nothing was wrong with the existing site and it was great at the beginning. Actually nothing has changed on my site, everything was great until I learned NextJS.
I spend my last 2 weeks with learning NextJS and TailwindCSS and that changed my vision about almost everything I see on the web. The way I learned it was reading lots of documention without understanding what it does and watching videos on Youtube about creating clones of existing websites like Spotify and Netflix which I’ll put the links of these videos down below. I spend my entire 2 week like that and in the end I became a web developer on my own and my first project was about rewriting my blog.
My first idea with this site was using a Backend as a Service provider like Pocketbase but than I wanted to stick with the original idea of my site which is based on Markdown. At the beginning doing that file based blog seemed too complicated than using Pocketbase but later I came across with some examples of markdown based blog sites and decided to take this route. At that point I started to dig the internet down in order to find my way and came across with lot’s of Youtube videos and StackOwerflow topics and all of them helped me a lot.
As the design, I tried to replicate the old one as much as possible with some small changes at theme but styling is almost as same as my old site. You can compare them below.
More technical details
So since this is my first public NextJS project, I want to give some more technical details about features and things I used.
Framework I use
So my new website uses NextJS 13 as React framework and TailwindCSS for styling.
It uses the feed library for the RSS feeds and markdown files for almost every page you see and .env as a config file for stuff like the front page content such as avatar image, name and about page. I made it like that so anyone who can edit text files can deploy my blog site as their own site.
The header and footer links are hard coded inside components/header and components/footer for now but I’m planning to make them configurable as soon as possible.
RSS
Currently my website has an RSS feed but the library I use was 7 years old and becouse of that it doesn't shows the content
Configration
Configuration of the website is very simple thanks to .env file. You can change the basic information on the front page, the metadata of the site and even the theming of the site. (For now it’s only possible to change the colors of text and background, you need to edit the app/layout.jsx for things like fonts and other stuff)
Things I’ll add in future
In this state this site is already in a great shape and works great for someone who wants a simple blog site that does use the bleeding edge web technologies but I wanna go further. And here is the things I want to add in future.
Cookies
- Currently my website doesn't uses cookies but I'm planning to implement it in future. I'll talk more about that. ### Custom theming
- Currently my website only has one theme for everyone but I want to add more options for readers like so many other pages and even my old site did. Which I removed it later becouse of it’s shitty look and feel.
Mastodon based commenting
- Some other blog sites like Cassidy James Bleade’s has this feature on their Jekyll based blogs and I want to add that feature to my site too. I don’t exactly know how to do that for now but I was saying the same thing about creating a website using NextJS.
Built in newsletter
- I always wanted to have a mail based newsletter for my blog but the existing ones were expensive for a website like mine and I wasn’t knew how to create one. But now I know how to use things like Nodemailer and Pocketbase. My plan with that is use Pocketbase as my noSQL database and Nodemailer to send e mails from my own server without paying anything to those providers. I’m not sure about how it’ll perform when so many people subscribe to newstseller but since more I F around more I’ll find out so we’ll see when I update my website.
Resources
So even tho I build all off these some Youtube videos from small channels actually helped me a lot and to help them I’m leaving them down below.
So this was it. I’m really happy that I finnally got my own blog site up and running. As always it's open source and you can find the source code over at my Github profile. Hopefully we’ll meet more on this site.
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Thank You!
05.08.2023 - 28/100