Pokézards

A few days ago I added a blogging system to Pokézards!

I built the site with Phoenix LiveView and was thinking about how can I integrate a blog into the site. My goal was to make this as simple as possible. I also did not want to use a 3rd party CMS and just use simple Markdown files.

My first thought was to create a new blog using maybe a static site generator like Hugo or Eleventy. However I wanted to integrate the blog, not on a subdomain, but a subpath like /blog. This is important for SEO! For hosting I use fly.io and I did not know how I could achieve this with their hosting. If I would have access to an NGINX I maybe could figure it out, but also I wanted to quickly ship a blog and not make it super complex.

After a googling "Phoenix LiveView blog" I quickly found the package NimblePublisher. This package allows you to create a simple blog system using just folders and markdown files. I was convinced and gave myself an hour to try it out. What can I say the package and documentation made everything super simple and I think I had my first test blog post ready in 15 Minutes!

For now, I am the only content creator for the site and therefore it is not a problem that the blog only uses Markdown files. In the future maybe there will be additional creators and a CMS might be needed, but I will let future Flo solve this problem and not worry about it now.

I hope the blog is prepared for a massive traffic spike in the future too. For my part, I added Cache-Control headers to the blog posts response and hope that the CDN caches the site and might reduce the load from the server. I know with Phoenix LiveView every user also creates a Websocket connection, but also for that I hope that Elixir will handle a massive spike easily. If not well... I might have to throw additional dollars to Fly 😅

Now that I can easily share Pokémon TCG news on the blog I hope the traffic for my site increases a bit and SEO starts kicking in.

Regarding what articles I write: I just try to keep up with the latest news. At the moment it feels like every day there is something new to share and it is really hard to keep up. At the moment I try to publish 1 article per day if there is something to share, but I might have to figure out a system to also keep working on future features. Maybe 1-week features and 1-week content writing might be a good balance?

The blog does also not feature complete. Search is missing, tag pages are missing, and comments are missing. Also better integrating the existing data about cards I already have into the blog articles would be cool. But for now, I think it serves enough value and in the future, I will add those features for sure!

If you'd like you can check out all the blog posts I have written so far here: https://pokezards.com/blog

Cheers,
Flo aka Phiilu

This is my first post here for my ongoing side-project Pokézards. I am usually bad at sharing what I work on, so this time I want to improve that a bit.

Pokézards (https://pokezards.com/) is a website to explore Pokémon TCG cards...for now. I have plans for what I want to do with that website in the future, but for now, it is just a simple content website.

I built the site using Phoenix LiveView and Tailwind CSS.

The project is a work in progress and I plan on working on it in the next foreseeable future.

So stay tuned for upcoming posts about it :)