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DevNow: What does a good open-source blog look like?

#DevNow#Blog89
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**Summary:** The author discusses the motivation behind creating an open-source blogging project called DevNow. As a programmer, they believe having a personal blog is essential for documenting learning, improving communication skills, and having a dedicated platform. After a conversation with a college friend about finding a suitable open-source project for a reading notes initiative, the author decided to develop DevNow, a modern and minimalist tech blog that supports features like one-click deployment on Vercel, comments, search, and more. DevNow is built using a modern tech stack including Astro, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, and offers various functionalities such as mobile compatibility, SEO support, Markdown support, and media embedding. The project emphasizes a clean UI, extensibility, and open-source principles, although it initially had some hard-coded elements that have since been improved based on user feedback. The author invites contributions and suggestions from the community to enhance the project, which is still in its early stages. They encourage readers to check it out and give feedback.

1. Introduction#

Why did I think about creating such an open-source blog project?

The reasons can be summarized as follows:

  • As a programmer, how can I not have my own blog?
  • To consolidate some of my learning content and record some technical articles.
  • To encourage myself to continuously produce content to improve my language expression skills.
  • It's a personal trait; I feel that having a platform of my own is truly wonderful.

In fact, I have written many blogs over time. Last year, I restructured my blog based on Next.js, and it looked something like this. It was written based on a blog template that I found quite nice at the time.

nextjs

So, under what circumstances was the open-source project DevNow Open Source Blog Project created?

At the beginning of last month, I was chatting with a college classmate who mentioned he was looking for a suitable open-source project to host his reading notes project but couldn't find one with a high match in UI and functionality. I suggested that I could write one and open-source it for everyone to use.

2. DevNow: A Modern Open Source Blog Project#

DevNow is a modern, minimalist open-source technical blog project. It supports one-click deployment on Vercel and features such as comments and search. Everyone is welcome to raise issues, star, and fork it for use.

GitHub address: https://github.com/LaughingZhu/DevNow

I have now migrated all the content from my blog, and it also serves as a weekly content platform, publishing some of the more popular topics in the tech community each week. It mainly focuses on technology-related content, but may also include some other topics and introductions to open-source projects.

My blog address: https://www.laughingzhu.cn/

My Blog

3. Currently Supported Features#

  • ✅ Mobile Adaptation
  • ✅ SEO & OpenGraph
  • ✅ Supports Markdown & MDX
  • ✅ Syntax Highlighting
  • ✅ Image Compression
  • ✅ Theme Color
  • ✅ Code Copying
  • ✅ Supports Sitemap
  • ✅ Supports RSS Feed Subscription
  • ✅ Draft Mode
  • ✅ 🔍 Article Search (Implemented with DocSearch)
  • ✅ Supports Comments (Giscus)
  • ✅ Supports Pagination
  • ✅ Annotations
  • ✅ Media Embedding (Currently supports YouTube, Twitter, Link, Vimeo)

4. Technology Stack#

  • Astro: Astro is a multifunctional web framework that includes everything you need to build a website. It has hundreds of different integrations and API hooks to customize your project based on your specific use case and needs.
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Mdx (When submitting or writing articles, please prioritize using .mdx; the format is the same as md, but .mdx has the highest support for the features mentioned above).
  • Vercel one-click deployment

5. Why is it called a modern open-source blog project?#

I think this topic might be quite open, so I'll briefly share my thoughts:

  • Modern and Simple UI: As a front-end developer, UI is very important to me. The overall UI of DevNow draws inspiration from some good UIs and is quite minimalist.
  • Technical Aspects: It primarily uses some of the more popular technology stacks from recent years, and the entire project has some valuable learning content.
  • Extensibility: The entire project is developed based on Astro, which allows for flexible integration of UI frameworks, including React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, SolidJS, AlpineJS, and Lit. This provides richer extensibility.
  • Openness: Most of the functional modules are built based on some open-source projects, which enhances the overall extensibility of the project. However, there are some downsides, such as the comments module based on Giscus, which requires users to configure some content themselves, making it a bit less user-friendly.

6. Reflections on the Gains from This Project#

Since its launch, I have gradually iterated through the basic functional modules. Everyone is welcome to fork and experience it, and I appreciate any issues and feedback.

Since this is my first time writing an open-source project, there was still a lot of hard-coded code in the initial version, which required users to dive into the project to find the corresponding modules for modification. My friend provided me with a lot of suggestions, and the current version has been optimized based on some open-source projects. Now, most of the basic information of the project can be modified in the configuration files. This can be considered a gain from the open-source project, as it has led to a shift in development thinking, making the project more flexible and extensible.

7. Conclusion#

Currently, DevNow is still a young open-source blog project that needs everyone to provide good suggestions and usage feedback. You are also welcome to contribute some quality content and news.

Since you've read this far, why not give me a star?

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