Personal Book Review Blog
Arte della Lettura is my personal blog where I review books since 2018. I started with Blogger, then moved to WordPress and now I finally decided to move to a completely self-made solution built with Next.js (React), TailwindCSS and MDX.
As stated in the introduction, this website was previously hosted on WordPress. While WordPress is great for many things, I hated not being able to do any customization (I don't know PHP). Also, to have a decent website I have to spend some money, which isn't great for a hobby website with no ads.
So, I decided to remake my blog from the ground up.
- Next.js - Frontend framework to make React actually usable in production
- TailwindCSS - Seemed great to reduce the css size, as classes are reused across the whole website. Also, easy dark mode
- MDX - To make cool posts, without MDX this blog wouldn't be possible (think of this like WordPress hooks)
- GitHub - I use GitHub for a lot of things, like comments
- Supabase - Used for the free database only
- Framer Motion - To make the website feel less boring
Saving things costs money. This blog is an hobby, I don't want to make money off of it, so every penny spent is a penny lost. As such, I wanted to design this website to be as cheap as possible. The best solution I found is to save everything as a JSON on GitHub. This means that I don't have relational data, but for this use case that is easily solved. By going this route I also get the additional advantage to have everything stored in one place and under my control.
Code is covered by GPLv3, while the articles/reviews are covered by Copyright©.