Eyal Roth's blog

This is the repository for my blog at eyalroth.com, containing both the code and content of the website.

It is built with GatsbyJS, based on the starter site Lumen 2, and hosted on Netlify.

Features

Structure

Minimal homepage.
Simplistic 404 page.
About page.
Blog posts.
Multiple languages - English (left to right) and Hebrew (right to left).

Layout

Sidebar with author information (image, name, title and contact links); becomes a floating topbar with collapsible components on smaller screens (mobile).
Site navigation menu with an animated slider component (part of the sidebar).
Light / dark theme (toggle button in the sidebar, persisted via a cookie).
Reading progress bar / scroll indication at the top of the page.
Persistent footer across the entire site.
Well suited for desktop and mobile use alike; multiple breakpoints for multiple screen sizes.
Adjusted for window resizing and screen orientation switch.

Posts

Post list pages by category, ordered by time.
Comments via utteranc.es (hosted on eyalroth/blog-gatsby-comments).
Code blocks syntax highlighting with PrismJS.
Footnotes styling with littlefoot.js.
Reading time estimation.
Metadata tags (not indexed, only for presentation).
Social sharing buttons / mobile share integration.
Series of posts - posts in a series can be navigated from one another and have their own unique post list page.

Technical

RSS feed (one for each language).
sitemap.xml and robots.txt.
Google analytics integration.
Offline support via service worker.
WPA integration via manifest.

Easter eggs

Dragging the author image reveals another image.

Known issues

Comments

Right-to-left comments are directed and aligned to the left. This is caused due to lack of builtin RTL support in GitHub comments. The workaround is to instruct users to use HTML tags in their comments.

Profile image

Dragging the profile image is sometimes glitchy, especially on desktop. I didn't make too much of an effort to correct that, seeing that even major websites such as YouTube and Twitch.tv exhibit a glitchy volume controller in their player.
Dragging the profile image doesn't work on tablets for some reason, only double-clicking does.

Unicode

Pages with unicode in their URL fail to load properly in Edge browser; encoding these with URLs with encodeURI doesn't work properly in Gatsby.

Build

Local development

The site is built with Gatsby which provides both a local development server (gatsby develop) and local serving capabilities (gatsby build && gatsby serve).

It should be possible to develop on any OS; I myself have been developing this site using WSL on Windows 10.

Deployment

The site is not only hosted on Netlify, but is also built and deployed via Netlify's CI / CD, which is connected directly to this repository and uses Gatsby's tools to build the site.

Environment variables

The site uses several environment variables during its build process:

URL - the site's URL.
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS - the Google Analytics site ID.
UTTERANCES_REPO - the path (not entire URL) of the GitHub repository containing the utteranc.es comments / issues (it is useful to use one for development purposes and one for production).
AUTO_RELOAD - determines whether the service worker should automatically reload the browser's page upon detecting site updates; if set to false, the site will prompt a window asking the user for permission to reload the site (useful when testing a staging site and wanting to make sure updates have been deployed and served locally).

Note the .env.development file which sets these variables for development mode (gatsby develop). There is no such file for "production" mode (gatsby build) and they have to be set manually (via export).

Also note the netlify.toml file which configures some of these variables on Netlify CI (URL is automatically set by Netlify).

Compatibility

The site is compatible with all modern browsers. It is not compatible with Internet Explorer (the site will not load and instead will display a message saying just that).

Testing

There are no automatic tests for the site.

It was manually tested by me and mostly on:

Windows 10 + Chrome.
Android smartphone (Galaxy S7) + Chrome.
Android tablet (Samsung Tab S3) + Chrome.

It was also partially tested on:

Windows 10 + Firefox.
Windows 10 + Edge.

It was not tested on any Apple product (Mac / iPad / iPhone) as I do not own any of these.

Link structure

Language prefixes are either en (English) or he (Hebrew).

Home

/{lang} - home page for each language.
/ redirects to /en.

Blog

/{lang}/blog/{year}/{month}/{name} - blog post page. These links are intended to never change; hence, a permalink.
/{lang}/blog/{category} - post list page for every language's category.
/{lang}/blog/series/{series-name} - post series list page.
/blog redirects to the main English category page.

Other

/{lang}/about- about page for each language.
/about redirects to the main English about page.
/404 - 404 Page.
/{lang}/rss.xml - RSS feed for each language.
/rss.xml redirects to /en/rss.xml.

Inspiration

The design and structure of this site draw much inspiration from many other sites out there, so here's a shout-out to them:

License

The content of this project itself is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and the underlying source code used to format and display that content is licensed under the MIT license.

eyalroth / blog-gatsby

readme