Here we are again, I rebuild repraze.com from scratch and have rekindled the wish to publish updates on my various engineering related hobbies. With the last iteration nearly a decade ago, back when I was a university student and still had most of my hair, this new website is long overdue.
A Fresh Start
The main reason for a rewrite was to move away from the old ejs↗ server side template rendering, inflexible unresponsive UI and outdated navigation. I've been learning and experimenting since, staying up to date with the latest and greatest, and didn't need much of an excuse to justify to myself that a full rewrite was the most reasonable thing to do.
This new site should allow for more interactive content, with interactive widgets, while keeping a good SEO, for page indexing and searchability, through SSR. My first attempt with React↗ didn't achieve the SEO goal since getting SSR to work ended up complicated, especially with server side data fetching for content and client side hydration mismatching. I eventually landed on Next.js↗ 13 with the latest /pages router.
Jargon aside, the new site is more then a new coat of paint. Sure its mobile friendly. Sure it has dark/light modes and color theming. But mainly it now allows me to write the content I want to write and how I want to write.
And basically unlimited embedding power. Tables, images an videos should no longer be a problem.
The Plan
I have a ton of ideas for new type of content to grow this site: - Bringing back project pages - possibly hosting downloadable assets... However I want to focus first on writing articles and putting content out there fairly regularly - I have a backlog of ideas and projects I can write about, but I need to be better at wrapping things up into straight to the point, digestible write-ups. Writing smaller articles will help with to begin, especially as I find my natural tone.
Let's GO! 🚀