Hey folks,
I recently stumbled upon a requirement: A blog/portfolio website for all my content creation activities. I wanted it to be a one stop destination for all my content.
Purpose
Basically, there are the different places where I create content:
- My Youtube channel, where I create animated tech videos.
- This dev.to blog where you are reading the current article.
Article No Longer Available
- My twitter account where I create sketchnotes related to Javascript.
Product Requirement
The product requirement was simple - A home page where users would land and get a summary/dashboard of the best content from all the 3 places mentioned above. And then a side-menu where they can naviagte between a detailed list of all of these.
Technical Requirement
My tech requirement was different. I have been working with react for quite some time now but this time around, I thought to experiment with SSR (Server side rendering). I wanted to experience the power of pre-rendering and also get advantage of the SEO that comes along with SSR. I know that gatsby and next were two of the most famous ways to accomplish the above.
tl;dr - I checked out next.JS first and fell in love with it (Still haven't looked at Gatsby). 😛
Next.JS - What I was looking for
So what did I find in next.js?
I found exactly what I was looking for:
- I would still code my SSR blog with react! ❤️
- The pre-rendered pages
- automatic routing based on file paths (how aweosme is that!)
- Sass support
- Zero configuration deployment with vercel!
It was all too good to be true. I was able to push the first build of my blog (rather a raw build) to production in about 2 hours in total from the point of creating the repo. And the cherry on top: vercel even provides you a free .now.sh domain!
I'll still hold off from sharing the first build of my blog as it is still a work in progress. But the experience so far has been flawless! fingers crossed. 🤞🏽
Kudos team vercel!
Cheers!
Top comments (7)
You got some interesting YouTube videos on your channel. Waiting for more on next!
Thanks a lot! Don't forget to subscribe to the channel :)
Already did and added videos to my list which I'll be watching this weekend 😬
Awesome!
oowwww ...I was expecting some insights about NextJs....and to see your blog in action.
Let us know when it's ready, I look forward to read your next article!
Thanks Julian. The blog will be ready in a week. Will write another article when done. :)
Did you try Sapper after Next? I thought I love Next but for performance reasons I picked Sapper in the end.