The blog moved house!

268 words

Almost a year of no problems

I've hosted this blog on Cloudflare workers for the last 11 months, and have found it to be a good tool, it's got a lot of features that make running the website simple, and the fact it runs at the edge guarantees quick load times. Next.js is designed to be fast, with minimal computation on the server side, which suits a CDN. We use Cloudflare at Connexin for site hosting, FaaS and KV storage, and I initially used it because I wanted to get more acquainted with our tech stack.

I designed this site on purpose to be very frontend focused and I've not been using other features of Cloudflare. There were no issues with hosting on Cloudflare until I wanted to upgrade to Next.js 13.

Growing pains

Developers need a few things, especially when working on personal projects, to enjoy using a language/platform.

• Ease of use: if it's complicated and fiddly to do something, it feels wrong, especially when it's something that tool does well
• Good performance: it's always satisfying to have, otherwise we'll end up getting annoyed
• Strong community: where it's easy to help and be helped, it's easier to build

There were a few niggling issues on the site, like annoying flashes of unstyled content, search engine optimisation issues and sitemap generation, and fiddly workarounds to get things on Cloudflare pages nicely. Luckily I could move the site over to Vercel with no problems and fix all these issues nicely, which is shown in the code now.

Happy days

The moral of the story, just because it's what you've done before, doesn't mean it's what you should keep doing.