How I Built My Blog

For homepage I got frozen page and: page is not responsive / page is slowing down browser message from both Firefox and Chrome - I guess all that cutting-edge tech for displaying the blog really loves giving my CPU a workout.

this is the self-destructive behaviour that's prevalent in the JS ecosystem.

say a newbie wants to develop a website or web app and they run into this. The amount of tools listed is overwhelming, even for me who's been doing JS for over 7 years.

and the sad thing is JS can be pretty productive, without the merchants of complexity shilling their tools.

Express.js v5 just got released. Thanks doug & other maintainers. Yet the API has been stable for over 10 years. Vue.js even with the new composition Api - the api has been stable for a long time. & other useful node libraries like 'pg' etc.

The only recent useful thing is tailwind.

Next.js / Nest.js etc are all complex tools that are completely unnecessary and shilled by dev-tools companies

I appreciate the author sharing technical details about how they build their blog. I do.

However I'd like ask the HN community here to share some examples of really simple blogs? Those that do not take building Rube Goldberg machines to publish the blogs. Perhaps those where the posts are just simple HTMLs. I'll take slapping a header and footer with some scripting or SSIs. But that's about it. Do you know any such simple examples of blogs? I think such blogs are under-appreciated and should be highlighted more often on HN.

> Over the years, my blog has become a surprisingly complex application. It’s over 100,000 lines of code, not counting the content.

When I read this my reaction was "that's ridiculous!" But the author is a skilled and experienced web developer. The rich educational interactivity on their site shows that achieving that level of presentational finesse doesn't come easily.

Something in the runtime JS is really slowing down the page.

Here's a demo video with scrolling after the page has loaded (really choppy) and scrolling after stopping the JS with Firefox's slow-script-detection-thingy (smooth): https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/joshwcomeau-slow-scroll_2.mp4

The code seems to enter a tight loop here whenever I'm scrolling: https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/joshwcomeau-debug-script.png

No one needs 100,000 LOC for a blog. A while back I wrote a blog generator for myself that took one markdown file per post and a template and turned it into a directory of static HTML files. The whole thing is 46 lines of shell script. The only dependency is a markdown parser.

I wanted to say, the OP home page hang my Firefox browser, probably due to issues with JavaScript regexp or React code.

Slow as molasses on my extremely aging iPhone 7, but I guess that’s to be expected

Scrolling down from the top of homepage is pretty choppy on my M3 Max in Safari

Josh has some really cool content on his site. The demos inlined within his posts are always top notch. His flexbox/grid articles are the most intuitive explanations of those layouts I've seen.

Josh really does have a lot of nice and shiny stuff. But Josh should also learn to optimise. Downloading 7MB of stuff for minimally interactive above-the-fold content is overkill.

Keep blog simple will make it's easier to generate raw idea.

I just made a new opensource project named TinyMind: https://github.com/mazzzystar/tinymind

Which allows you to create your blog page in 1 minutes and share to anyone.

It's non-profitable, just for hobby and helping most people who don't want stuck in Hexo/Hugo or code.

I'm going to follow this thread just to know how successful "I built my own blog" posts still do in HN. I expect it to not attract that much attention anymore?

Crashed on scrolling for me on latest Librewolf stable/Fedora 40. I usually love Josh's work, but this isn't it.

This was a lovely blogpost. I think as software engineers we've lost a lot of the enthusiasm that used to be prevalent amongst the profession 5-10 years back. He mentions it himself you don't necessarily need all of this for a blog. I still enjoyed the tour. It's a nice blog and his content is usually well written and easy to follow.

When I read the blog was 10.000 lines of code and there was a long list of busswordesques technologies implied, I thought this was a parody.

Reading that it crashes or eat the CPU for some people, I still believe it somewhat is. It also displays very badly on my own Firefox (with very recent computer).

And I could not find a list of all posts.

I mean… My own blog is a 500 lines python script without any external dependency. It has 42 lines of CSS. And it is all contained, content included, in one git repository. It has a list of all the blog posts you can quickly scroll through. It displays the same on every single computer/browser/smartphone, even very slow connection on old hardware. (sources are here : https://sr.ht/~lioploum/ploum.net/ )

But I’m not an experienced web dev.

I find this post a bit misleading. It seems like he didn't build a blog. He built a website with real requirements, then added a blog to it.

The title* feels a bit rage baity to be honest.

That guys made it to the top of the Bell Curve…

https://mamot.fr/@ploum/113044736819173509