Add right side navigation to blog post

[iskerrett]

Story

No response

Description

Our blog posts hav very narrow margins. On my screen the blog takes up less than 33% of the space, the rest is white space. This is the only page on the site like this. I would suggest we widen the margins to make it easier to read and create a more standard look.

[joepavitt]

I understand the concern here, but blog content shouldn't be too wide as it discourages engagement as explained here: https://socialtriggers.com/perfect-content-width/

That article states ideal width is between 400-600px, ours is currently 650px.

What a lot of other engaging blogs do is fill content to the left/right, which I think is our better option, e.g:

• https://posthog.com/blog/hogmail-20
• https://tyk.io/blog/a-guide-to-navigating-opinions-and-hot-topics-in-api-management/
• https://www.confluent.io/blog/cloud-kafka-meets-cloud-flink-with-confluent-and-immerok/

Medium does the same:

• https://joepavitt.medium.com/designing-with-data-ee70f4782837
• https://joepavitt.medium.com/building-the-web-based-3d-digital-experience-for-the-mayflower-autonomous-ship-a56f08e6558

[iskerrett]

OK, let's start adding navigation to the right side of each blog post. To start with I would like to see the following:

• Related Links section that list links the blog author thinks will be useful for the user. By default, we should have 'Sign-up for FlowForge Cloud'
• Sign-up to the Newsletter

[joepavitt]

For the recommended/related links, any suggestion on how we'd like to populate this? I see a few options:

1. Manually for every blog article, we append a few articles we think are related
   • time consuming and requires knowledge of all of our artcile archive in order to pick relevant content, but ensures relevant content if this is the case.
2. Automatically take the last x posts created by the same Author
   • easy, but funnels just to this author, and may present unrelated content
3. We start tagging content (something we should be doing for https://github.com/flowforge/website/issues/303 anyway) and utilise the tags to get the most recent articles with the associated tag
   • More upfront work, but scales better, and ensures relevant content, without funnelling to a single author.

Thoughts @robmarcer @iskerrett?

[ZJvandeWeg]

@joepavitt What about a first iteration that does just take 3 other posts at random? Or take the 'latest updates'?

[joepavitt]

Very simple styling, but it's a start point we can improve on and add some design flair to in the future: