Website Readme
This is my website! The react client, at least. It's built with NextJS and hosted on Vercel so the "client" actually does have some server-side action like pre-rendering most pages. The back end is Supabase so the client uses their supabase-js client library.
Design patterns
The visual design of the site is meant to be very simple, not loud,
and without too many options. For instance, there are not 4 different
types of buttons, there are 2 (.button.outlines and .button.solid).
The only theme colors so far are Tailwind's cyan, red, and coolGray. The entire theme operates on these; red is used only for error text and never as a background. Cyan is only used as a background for "critical path" buttons like "Submit login" and "Save post".
The main separation between form factors is at the md breakpoint at 768px,
though other breakpoints are used for responsive typography and changes
to the grid size, when needed. sm, md, and lg are available.
The big visual banner is only used on index pages; post pages confine their
feature image to within the <PostArticle> component, whose width is capped at
max-w-prose (68ch), as are other elements like the login form.
This site mostly uses left-alignment within centered layout areas. When there are two items to place next to one another, default to justify-between so items are pushed to the edges of their respective containers.
Code patterns
The site uses NextJS's built-ins wherever possible, including the useSWR
hook to manage data fetching. Forms are handled by react-hook-forms.
Although supabase-js handles all the fetcher functions, client-side fetching
is still routed through useSWR for its convenient cache management which so
far has obviated the need for any central store or context providers.
Components that need to know whether the user is logged in can use the hook
useSession to see if the session is present and the basic details of
the logged in user.
For pages requiring authentication, there is a single component
<LoginChallenge> which checks the /logged_in API and either presents the
login form as a modal, or dispatches the returned authenticated user object
for the rest of the app.
Similarly, there is an <ErrorList> component that goes at the bottom of each
form or each page that might require one. It accepts either a single message
or an array, and hides itself when empty. So for both LoginChallenge and
ErrorList, you can simply drop the component wherever you want it and not worry
about conditions, as long as you instantiate useState hooks for user and
errors, the components will figure out whether they're needed.
For the sake of easy navigation, Component and Lib files are allowed to contain
several functions or components, so e.g. we have lib/auth.js with all the
functions related to user authentication, rather than something like
lib/login/checkLogin.js and so on for individual functions. Still, the
longest file is ~100 lines, and should probably stay that way.
There is currently no global management of variables and metadata like the
site's title and description or other metadata. Nor is there any global state
or context management. Metadata stays DRY because its defaults are managed in
the <Layout> component.
Details to cover
- There are no tests.
- Some of the error handling isn't quite right – 500s being treated as 401s, etc. – and may be clunky and overly redundant.
- Supabase's RLS means that unauthenticated/invalid requests often return [] instead of a 401 error, so I need to do some work to handle this better. Right now it can result in loss of data if you log out in one tab and try to save a post in another. There's no pre-flight check and the JS errors in a way that will lose your progress.
- ESLint and Prettier are both in use; should add husky to automate.
- The app currently does not accept file/image uploads, but this should be easy now with Supabase!
- On mobiles, the post page's "About the author" section just shows up at the top of the page, large, centered, feeling kind of out of place and inconsistent with the rest of the layout of the site.