I read Hacker News (HN hereafter) daily.
The way I read is that, I skim through titles and open 5~10 stories and actually read 2~5.
Two problems I have with HN.
- Each HN page shows 30 stories only and
- having to click on “more” for a post-back seemed too much of a pain
And I don’t need real-time updates of the story.
So I created SHaNc, a Static page Hacker News clone.
I will only introduce you SHaNc in this article. Details on how it was built and problems faced while building it will be discussed in the next post.
❓ Why?
It solves two problems mentioned above.
- Skimming through 30 pages at a time takes focus away
- Loading next page with a post-back is slow
SHaNc loads all stories in one page (solves the first problem) and fast as it’s a static page
and also learn GatsbyJS & Styled Components along the way.
🤷 What?
SHaNc is a static page, which displays all stories (Best & New story pages planned), which solves both problems – loads all stories & fast (for being a static page).
A static page is by definition doesn’t change. So the page is rebuilt every hour on the hour.
So you will probably be at most 1 hour behind.
🤔 How about other static HN clones?😕
There are other two awesome static HN clones.
They are fast but I still had the problem of having to load next page manually, which takes your focus away.
🏭 Tech Stack & Architecture
Nothing fancy.
- GatsbyJS – a static site generator using ReactJS
- Styled Components – CSS in JS
- Netlify – deployment & Build WebHook
- Azure Functions – triggering site build via Build WebHok every hour
SHaNc architecture (Hand-drawn on a piece of paper 😝)
🏃♂️ Parting Words
If you have a similar HN reading style, I hope SHaNc can help to address your problems.
Please leave a feedback, issues, suggestion on GitHub page (MIT licensed).
The post Introducing SHanC – A Static Hacker News Clone appeared first on Slight Edge Coder
Top comments (2)
Look the look'n'feel, and I really enjoy seeing your drawing for the project!
Thank you for the feedback, Joe~