Hashnode tech blog starter kit

Hello, I'm Emmanuel, a full-stack software engineer specialized in backend development. This marks my inaugural attempt at creating a highly functional website intended for use by individuals and institutions.

As technology continually evolves and our demand for solutions grows, we witness the emergence of essential tech startups aimed at addressing these challenges.

The tech world is bustling with activity, much of which goes unnoticed. However, with the assistance of tech blogs such as Techcrunch and Techcabal, covering topics like layoffs, startup acquisitions, bankruptcies, and the challenges faced by tech CEOs, one can truly appreciate the usefulness of these blogs.

The Idea

Initially, I planned to participate in the integration category of the hackathon. However, I've been honing my backend skills for a while now, and while my frontend skills are lacking, the current opportunity has become the perfect motivation to improve them.

Additionally, though Hashnode is primarily a developer-centric platform, the release of the headless API presents opportunities for developers like me, who love reading about tech and startups, to build on top of the API. This hackathon submission revolves around a demo template for developers, startups, etc., to use for blogging about tech.

The Project

The project was developed using Next.js, leveraging the app router and various other technologies.

Features

The project features pagination to load more blog posts, CMD K for blog search, sitemap, image optimization, amazing design (minimal), input debounce, responsive design (even though am not design oriented) etc.

Initializing the project

You will need to provide some environment variables in order to use this properly and these are:

NEXT_PUBLIC_HASHNODE_GQL_ENDPOINT=https://gql.hashnode.com
NEXT_PUBLIC_HASHNODE_PUBLICATION_HOST=[blog_name].hashnode.dev
NEXT_PUBLIC_MODE=development

Challenges

I encountered some challenges while using the Hashnode API and building with it, such as the lack of documentation and blog-related features like blog categories, parsing the blog post content securely, deciding to use markdown content over html etc.

However, I am grateful for their support, which proved invaluable when I needed assistance.

Here is a link to my pull request.

Here is a live preview

#APIHackathon #emee-dev