Rewriting my blog from scratch with NextJS

1

Plausible.io

At this point, I looked into some existing analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Plausible, but they either collected unnecessary information, or were costing money. I could have self-hosted some of them, but given the little traffic I had so far, all of these options would have been significantly more expensive than what I went with now: Writing my own little serverless analytics tool. The main reason for this was to learn more about DynamoDB, though.

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Privacy 203 social mentions

2

GitHub Pages

When I first started, I tried hosting the blog on GitHub Pages. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to make this work with a custom domain that was not hosted on a subdomain, as GitHub Pages requires the use of a CNAME record, and these can't be set on a root domain like startup-cto.net. I could have decided for a subdomain like www.startup-cto.net, but this would have required an additional redirect or rewrite solution, or put me in danger of losing all my existing SEO juice for startup-cto.net. I had anyway thought about trying out AWS Amplify at that point, so that's what I did.

#Static Site Generators #Cloud Computing #Blogging 500 social mentions

3

Next.js

When I decided to rewrite my blog, one of the reasons was that I wanted to learn more about NextJS. It had already gotten some traction then, and seemed like a good fit for a blog. It was a bit overkill compared To other solutions like Gatsby, but I liked the idea of learning something That would allow me to quickly create even more complicated prototypes thanks to API routes.

#Developer Tools #Web Frameworks #JavaScript Framework 1094 social mentions

4

Ghost

"Writing a blog" is usually taken as "writing articles for a blog". I did this for a while, using Ghost to host the blog. And it mostly worked, but there were multiple reasons for me to change it:.

#Blogging #CMS #Blogging Platform 194 social mentions

5

AWS CloudFormation

All the infrastructure is defined via AWS CDK, a library on top of CloudFormation. The code is now in its own project.

#DevOps Tools #Continuous Integration #Continuous Deployment 125 social mentions

6

Amazon Athena

Other systems either use SQL databases for this purpose, or multi-step pipelines that use different tools for storing and querying the data. I didn't want to use either solution, on the one hand, because I didn't find free solutions for low traffic, and on the other the hand because I anyway wanted to experiment a bit with DynamoDB.

#Data Analysis #ETL #Business Intelligence 24 social mentions

7

AWS Amplify

When I first started, I tried hosting the blog on GitHub Pages. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to make this work with a custom domain that was not hosted on a subdomain, as GitHub Pages requires the use of a CNAME record, and these can't be set on a root domain like startup-cto.net. I could have decided for a subdomain like www.startup-cto.net, but this would have required an additional redirect or rewrite solution, or put me in danger of losing all my existing SEO juice for startup-cto.net. I had anyway thought about trying out AWS Amplify at that point, so that's what I did.

#Developer Tools #App Development #Backend As A Service 3 social mentions