website

Hey thanks! :D It’s almost all custom (you can see the source on my GitHub https://github.com/brundonsmith/website) Most of the site is statically generated at startup using regular JS template strings, and then served as static files (cached in-memory) by Express. Posts are written in Markdown, and code blocks are processed into language-highlighted HTML using Prism. The only dynamic bit is the HN comments, since I want those to stay fresh. My Node server queries the Algolia HN API to get all comments for the top HN link for the post (since there could be more than one), munges the data a bit, renders it as HTML, and then caches it for one minute. Some client-side JS just hits the endpoint and dumps the HTML into the page. Any rich rendering inside comment bodies, like for code blocks and italics, actually comes directly from HN itself!

I wrote some code for my site that 1) finds the most active link to the post on HN, and 2) uses the HN API to pull in and render its comments at the bottom. The site is statically-rendered, but there's a bit of client-side JS that loads the latest comments when you visit the page. Most of the work is done on the back-end; the front-end just grabs the content and drops it in. Example: https://www.brandons.me/blog/three-types-of-data Implementation: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/load...

Not sure if this counts, but for simple stuff (both front and back-end!) I've been loving regular JS template strings for rendering HTML. Your render logic ends up looking very similar to React functional components, and you can get editor extensions that do syntax highlighting inside the string. There are obvious downsides - on the back-end it's slower than a proper templating system, and on the front-end you're rebuilding the DOM tree from scratch each time, with all the limitations that includes (performance, animations get interrupted, HTML state gets lost, any event listeners have to be re-initialized). But for simple stuff, I cannot recommend it enough. Here's a back-end example from my personal website: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website/blob/master/src/rend... And here's a front-end example: https://github.com/brundonsmith/bl

I'm quite proud of my very simple hand-rolled blog, and I'm happy to say I've only written one post about it :) https://github.com/brundonsmith/website Just Express.js + some native template strings for HTML and a Markdown library. Writes the static HTML to disc when the server starts up.

Here's mine; I'm pretty proud of it. It's JavaScript but the only meaningful dependencies are Express (basic HTTP server) and a markdown parser. It's basically a hand-rolled static site generator + a static file server. Both of those are trivial to do with JS/Node. I over-engineered the static file serving a little bit in hopes of keeping files cached in memory, but that bit can easily be replaced with Express' built-in static file serving middleware. https://github.com/brundonsmith/website

Hybrid client/server React is a monstrosity that does provide a genuinely compelling set of benefits. Next.js neatly wraps up this monstrosity so you can at least try to pretend it doesn't exist. Server-side-only React sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of what purpose React actually serves. In React, you write functions that accept data and output what amounts to HTML. Thing is, you can easily do this with a plain template string. You're just dropping values into HTML. The only benefit provided by React is the efficient modification of existing DOM to bring it up to date with the new state, without dropping the whole thing and rebuilding it from scratch. If there is no existing DOM - because you're only making one rendering pass - React serves no purpose at all. Here's my website. It uses virtually nothing except Express and a Ma

I built my personal website with nothing but Express and JS template strings: https://github.com/brundonsmith/website. It's so simple to do that I almost question the necessity of "static site generators" in general (Next.js of course does much more than static site generation).