Welcome to my latest Blog Project. It is generally a recreation of my last blog website plus some improvements! I wanted to do this one mostly to see how easy (or hard) it would be put together a website that didn't require me to add anything new.   The project itself was a breeze and did not require too much extra. My only hiccup was the dynamic routing provided by Next JS for the blog posts. Other than that, it's all just an exercise. My last project used Material UI, but I am a fan of Bootstrap so this was a refresher on using it. I want to say, from beginning to end, it only took about a week to do this one (I can only work a few hours at a time due to having a full-time job). I used PostgreSQL for my last database, and caught hell trying to host it. This one uses MongoDB, and is much easier to manage in production. Overall, I enjoyed updating an old site with new knowledge. I think it's important to work on projects that do not require you to do new stuff all the time. Sometimes, you just need to exercise existing knowledge.

My Journey Creating This Website

With so many frameworks and coding languages, I wanted to make a post about why I use NextJS over others, such as EJS, vanilla React or Angular. Well, I initially learned EJS, but I never liked its syntax to inject javascript into my code. It felt ugly. After I learned React, I really enjoyed its method for breaking everything into components (similar to EJS) and the ability to edit and work with section by section. However, since it compiles your code into javascript mumbo-jumbo, SEO is out of the question. Since I knew I would be building websites for clients who would want SEO, I knew that would be a dealbreaker. NextJS is basically React on steroids! It addresses all its limitations and gives added functionalities. I can isolate my code into chunks without feeling overwhelmed by so many moving parts.

I haven't had the pleasure of learning Angular, Vue,  or any other framework, so I cannot say if they are better/worse than Next. But I feel like I can do everything I need with Next. The only added layer is how to manage styling. I've used Bootstrap (my current favorite and Material UI - which has its pros and cons). I've read through pros and cons to Next, but I haven't encountered any use-cases where I need to address those. It is my intent to learn additional languages in case I come across a project that requires such. But, in my (albeit brief) experience, it's good to pick a language and stick to it, instead of bouncing between them often because you have to constantly relearn syntax and never get the opportunity to perfect skills.

In all, I lean towards NextJS because its benefits outweigh its limitations in my use cases!

Why I Use Next JS

Today, I pushed all my projects to GitHub. I know, I know... I should be using GitHub all the time anyways. I haven't truly dipped into those waters, as I've never had an issue with saving my projects locally. But I think it's important for people to be able to see the work that goes into building websites. Even simple ones! I'm no expert in these fields and I'm sure as I learn more, the code will become more concise.  The interesting thing is (which you can see between my blog projects), the difference in coding skill has really grown! I plan to devote more time to GitHub to master branching and merging so I can really track progression for my projects as I add and update them over time!

My Blog,
My Business

the Journey.

About Me

This is my story.

Blog Posts

My Blog, My Business

the Journey.

About Me

This is my story.

Blog Posts

My Blog,
My Business