blog

This is the blog that powers rauchg.com, built on next.js and deployed to the cloud via now.

Depends on the blog-views microservice for the realtime views display.

How to run

Development

All that's needed to run this blog is:

npm install
npm run dev

Then head to http://localhost:3000. Changes you make to components will henceforth be reflected there in realtime.

Deployment

All that's needed to deploy this blog to the cloud is to execute a single command (install it here)

now

When I deploy, I get a new instance of the blog at a new, immutable URL. When I browse to it and verify it looks ok, I set up an alias targetting the production URL rauchg.com.

now alias <url> rauchg.com

Architecture

Pure components

Every stateless pure component is found under ./components.

Every component that has to do with styling the post's markup is found under ./components/post/

These components make up the style guide of the application.

Blog posts

Every blog post is a static page hosted under pages/$year/.

This allows every post to load arbitrary modules, have custom layouts and take advantage of automatic code splitting and lazy loading.

This means that the bloat of a single post doesn't "rub off on" the rest of the site.

An index of all posts is maintained in JSON format as ./posts.json for practical reasons.

Custom server

I set up a server.js that boots up Next.js programatically. This gives me complete control over the HTTP request and response cycle.

In this case, the routes structured under pages/ are sufficient, but I set up a few redirections to retain compatibility with my previous WordPress based setup.

To start the custom server, I run node server.js upon deployment.