Empowering Creativity: Building the Ultimate Blogging Platform with MERN Stack

codenamu — Mon, 08 May 2023 10:46:26 +0000

Today, I would like to present to my fellow developers one of the milestones that I have accomplished. I am building my own blogging platform from scratch using the MongoDB, Express, React, and Nodejs (MERN) stack.

Building the server API

The first thing that I did was plan how to build it.

After making sure that everything could be done with the skillset that I have, I began building the backend or server API that will fetch data from the database in MongoDB.

I used NodeJS and Express to create the server API and the REST API architecture to design the routes and controllers.

Testing the routes

To test the routes, I used Postman. I'm grateful that Postman existed because it made it so easy to test the routes that I have developed. You can see if your routes are all working without creating the view or forms needed. Awesome, right?

Deploying to Production

Anyway, after making sure that everything was working for my backend API, I deployed it to Railway. For those who want to deploy a dynamic website, this is the best.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Railway or anything. It's just that their pricing is so cheap and affordable for solo developers like me, who are totally broke. Also, deploying to Railway is so easy and fast. It took me just a couple of minutes to deploy my server API. For those who are curious, this is the backend of my blogging platform that I was talking about: Blog API.

Building the View

Moving forward, I developed a separate website that will serve as the view of my blog using React. It is now responsive and looks good on all devices. Currently, only dummy data is available in the blog posts, as I have not written anything yet. You can check out the website here: solodevhub.com.

This is how it looked in a tablet:

But soon, I will be writing blogs that will tell my journey in software development. I will share tips and tricks that I have learned along the way. Also, I will share really good materials that will hopefully help those who are just in the beginning of their journey in web development and software development in general.

What's next?

The next thing I will do is develop a separate website that will serve as the writer of my blog posts. I'm the only author of the blog, so I'll just be using PassportJS along with Jason Web Tokens (JWT) to authenticate and secure the site. I'm planning on building it using React again.