With the recent twitter turmoil, I decided to update my website and blog. Personal sites are now kinda like the vinyl of the internet; and I like that. The site now has RSS and actually works (see Hosting).
Adding RSS
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a format that allows a user to subscribe to a feed. (By the way, I use Reeder to consoom RSS feeds.) When I added custom post support to this site, I created a function that returned all the posts (this then generates all the pages that Next.js renders for /blog/[slug].) This function is also useful for generating an RSS feed. It's waaaay too complex to cover here (here's the file that does this), but the gist is that we generate an RSS feed template with an array of post objects, render the XML, then write that XML to a file (feed.rss in the project's public folder). This happens in the yarn build command, after we run next build.
Hosting
With the relativley new news of Heroku dropping their free teir (now you have to pay $5/mo for dyno hours), I decided to move my website to GitHub pages. (The source code was already open source anyways, so it isn't a big deal.) Which is great and all, but I had a problem; Next.js sites like to be served with the built in Next.js server.
With heroku, I could just tell it to build the site, then run the server provided by Next.js; behind cloudflare of course. But GitHub pages only serves static content, which means I have to use the dreaded next export command. But after a bit of fanangling, I got it to work with a github workflow that runs on every push. (Check out the pages.yml that I got from the Next.js on GitHub Pages Demo.)
But, I had another problem. I kept getting redirected to the apex domain (with 301's). Turns out, you have to dissable the cloudflare proxy when using custom domains on GitHub pages. After that, I decided to write this article and work on something else.