Revamped Code
I've spent a chunk of this last week doing something I've been putting off for years: rewritting the code that powers this site.
For years, Toast Driven has been (unsurprisingly) running as a small Django-based site. It's been through a handful of small revisions & tweaks over the years:
- removing tags/comments
- moving from raw HTML to Markdown-based posts,
- adding support for multiple authors when it was a business,
- etc.
All the while, it's been perilously running on a very old version of Django. Updating everything seemed like too much of a hassle, and I'd dread making new posts because it would always remind me of how out-of-date the site was. This has also made it required to have a full small server running, to support the database & dynamic generation.
But No Longer!
I've rewritten (& published the source code) the whole site. It's now build using Next.js & is a nicely static site.
Why Write Another Blog?
For the longest time, I've recognized that backing the site with a database was overkill. In addition, what I really wanted was a version-controlled hierarchy of Markdown files for the posts to generate the site.
There are other options out there (such as Jekyll or Hugo). However, I don't really care for their templating/requirements.
Given that much of the last couple years has been spent creating React applications, I wanted to play with Next.js.
How Is It Not Just The Tutorial?
The existing Next.js tutorial is based on the older Pages Router.
This is fine, but I started from the recommended newer App Router when I started the repository & wanted to commit to learning the latest-and-greatest.
There aren't a lot of other references out there (that I found) on how to build with the App Router, so I open-sourced the code in case it's helpful to someone else.
The End? NOT The End
I'm excited because this kills many of the reasons I haven't blogged in a long time, and it's a fun new stack to play with. Maybe I'll write up a "trials and tribulations" post about the process of creating the new code.
And while I've been doing this long enough to know these are likely Famous Last Words™, this should let me post more frequently in the future.