I've re-thought how I'm rendering my blog pages.

When I developed the site initially, I wasn't too worried about the difference between SSR and SSG. If anything, I wanted to lean on server rendering blog content so scheduled posts would load after their posting time passed.

Since then, my workflow has changed over to always publishing posts when I push the changes to GitHub. Posts are markdown files that are saved in the same repo as this site, so anytime a new post goes up, the site is rebuilt.

All that to say that I've been missing out on a juicy optimization opportunity with Next's static page generation!

So it's just as easy as switching the function name from getServerSideProps over to getStaticProps, right? Not quite in my case!

Page Structure

The pages that I'm looking to switch over are my blog feed pages. So that includes:

• /blog
• /blog/[tag]
• /blog/[tag]/[page]

/blog is easy enough!

/blog/[tag] is the landing page for any of that tags clicked on either in a post or on my homepage. Tags could be what I have listed as "primary tags" such as "music", "art", or "tech." They could also be smaller tags, such as "React" that I have linked on individual blog pages, but that I don't list on my landing page or blog index page.

Some of those tags are now rendering content through pagination! So I have to take into account [page] numbers as well.

To get the full benefit of Static rendering with dynamic routes, I'll have to provide the routes that I want generated. Next has a fallback to server render requests that don't have a static page, so I'll exclude my smaller tags and focus in on the primary tags. I'll also want to generate the paginated links, measure how many pages need to be rendered per tag.

getStaticPaths

getStaticPaths is the function where I'll be passing in my routes. This is added outside of the component alongside getStaticProps to then generate the content for those routes.

For Tags Rendered as a List Page

This is pretty straightforward for tag pages. Just one level of looping involved:

export async function getStaticPaths() {
  return {
    paths: getBlogTagParams(),
    fallback: 'blocking',
  };
}

const getBlogTagParams = () => {
  const tagsDisplayedAsList = ['books', 'notes', 'tech', 'art', 'music'];
  return tagsDisplayedAsList.map((tag) => {
    return {
      params: {
        tag,
      },
    };
  });
};

For Paginated Tags

For music and art, it's one more level of looping and a few more lines of code:

export async function getStaticPaths() {
  return {
    paths: getBlogPageParams(),
    fallback: 'blocking',
  };
}

const getBlogPageParams = () => {
  const allPostFields = ['title', 'date', 'hidden', 'tags'];
  const allPosts = getAllPosts(allPostFields);
  const publishedPosts = allPosts.filter(filterBlogPosts);

  const res = [];

  const fullPostPreviewTags = ['art', 'music'];

  fullPostPreviewTags.forEach((tag) => {
    const capitalizedTag = capitalizeFirstLetter(tag);
    const regex = new RegExp(capitalizedTag, 'i');
    let thisTagsPosts = publishedPosts.filter((post) =>
      post.tags.some((e) => regex.test(e))
    );
    const count = thisTagsPosts.length;
    const lastPage = Math.ceil(count / 5);
    const pageNumbers = Array.from({ length: lastPage }, (_, i) =>
      (i + 1).toString()
    );
    const tagSlug = lowercaseFirstLetter(tag);
    const thisTagAndPageParams = pageNumbers.map((pageNum) => ({
      params: {
        tag: tagSlug,
        page: pageNum,
      },
    }));
    res.push(...thisTagAndPageParams);
  });

  const feedCount = publishedPosts.length;
  const feedLastPage = Math.ceil(feedCount / 5);
  const feedPageNumbers = Array.from({ length: feedLastPage }, (_, i) =>
    (i + 1).toString()
  );
  const feedTagAndPageParams = feedPageNumbers.map((pageNum) => ({
    params: {
      tag: 'feed',
      page: pageNum,
    },
  }));
  res.push(...feedTagAndPageParams);

  return res;
};

There's a fair amount of data massaging in there. The key point of note is that for each tag, I'm calculating the number of pages by dividing total posts by how many are rendered to each page:

    const count = thisTagsPosts.length;
    const lastPage = Math.ceil(count / 5);
    const pageNumbers = Array.from({ length: lastPage }, (_, i) =>
      (i + 1).toString()
    );

From there, then it's a matter of piping that into the params object for getStaticPaths

Voilà! Now the site won't need to parse every blog post to render each of these preview pages! The static file will already have been generated and ready to go on request.

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☁️

The backing is prerecorded, but Miranda from the other room thought that I just got WAY better all of a sudden 😂

🌅 🌸

Miranda's least favorite enemy to fight, but my favorite to draw!

One aspect of developing my art grid was moving away from the Next image component and choosing a more flexible option with special css.

There are still plenty of spots on the site I wanted to keep using it, though! This week, I wanted to jot down why.

CLS

Content Layout Shift is something I've written about a few times. Surprisingly, this is my first touch on images, the largest culprits of creating CLS!

A page is typically peppered with images throughout. An image can be wholly optimized to be very lightweight, but can still contribute to a negative user experience if the dimensions are not accounted for.

Say you're reading this blog. And a put an image right above this paragraph. If an image FINALLY loads as you're reading this, all of a sudden this paragraph is pushed down and now you have to scroll to find your place. Ugh.

The Solution

The way to mitigate this is pretty simple: Set dimensions on your images.

Easy if you already know what they are: Use css to set explicit widths and heights. You can even use media queries to set them depending on the screen size.

It gets a little trickier if you're doing this dynamically, not knowing what dimensions your image will be. The best bet, then, is to set a container for the image to reside in , and have the image fill the container. Thinking of a div with an img child.

Next Image Component

It's not too involved to code this yourself, but Next.js comes out of the box with a component to handle this along with many other goodies. The Image Component in Next offers Size optimization for local images and lazy loading.

Here I'm using the component for my albums page

import React from 'react';
import Image from 'next/image';
import Link from 'next/link';

const MusicGrid = ({ albums }) => {
  return (
    <>
      <section className="music_display">
        {albums.map((album) => (
          <article key={album.title}>
            {/* <Link href={album.link}> */}
            <Link href={`/${album.slug}`}>
              <a data-test="musicGridLink">
                <Image src={album.coverURL} width="245" height="245" />
                <span>{album.title}</span>
              </a>
            </Link>
          </article>
        ))}
      </section>
    </>
  );
};

export default MusicGrid;

And here is what's generated to the DOM. It's a huge sample, but you can find a few interesting points in there:

The key pieces being the srcset used for different sized images generated for free. These are made with externally sourced images, interestingly enough, but they're generated by the component to handle rendering specifically to the page!

<article>
  <a data-test="musicGridLink" href="/forest"
    ><span
      style="
        box-sizing: border-box;
        display: inline-block;
        overflow: hidden;
        width: initial;
        height: initial;
        background: none;
        opacity: 1;
        border: 0;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        position: relative;
        max-width: 100%;
      "
      ><span
        style="
          box-sizing: border-box;
          display: block;
          width: initial;
          height: initial;
          background: none;
          opacity: 1;
          border: 0;
          margin: 0;
          padding: 0;
          max-width: 100%;
        "
        ><img
          style="
            display: block;
            max-width: 100%;
            width: initial;
            height: initial;
            background: none;
            opacity: 1;
            border: 0;
            margin: 0;
            padding: 0;
          "
          alt=""
          aria-hidden="true"
          src="data:image/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%27245%27%20height=%27245%27/%3e" /></span
      ><img
        src="/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75"
        decoding="async"
        data-nimg="intrinsic"
        style="
          position: absolute;
          top: 0;
          left: 0;
          bottom: 0;
          right: 0;
          box-sizing: border-box;
          padding: 0;
          border: none;
          margin: auto;
          display: block;
          width: 0;
          height: 0;
          min-width: 100%;
          max-width: 100%;
          min-height: 100%;
          max-height: 100%;
        "
        srcset="
          /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 1x,
          /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 2x
        " /><noscript
        ><img
          srcset="
            /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 1x,
            /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 2x
          "
          src="/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75"
          decoding="async"
          data-nimg="intrinsic"
          style="
            position: absolute;
            top: 0;
            left: 0;
            bottom: 0;
            right: 0;
            box-sizing: border-box;
            padding: 0;
            border: none;
            margin: auto;
            display: block;
            width: 0;
            height: 0;
            min-width: 100%;
            max-width: 100%;
            min-height: 100%;
            max-height: 100%;
          "
          loading="lazy" /></noscript></span
    ><span>Forest</span></a
  >
</article>

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Sangin'! With Lucy!

🤫🦭😴

A visit to the homepage of this very site on desktop will show the neat instagram-like image grid of my sketches! Now that much of my blog is visual, and since it's been a year of me drawing, it's time to make a nice display for my drawings.

Creating it with my current setup has been interesting! I'll walk you through it, covering extracting the images and piping them through Next's server side handler.

Parsing Markdown

The setup for my blog is through static files. Meaning, every post is a markdown file, with metadata included at the top of the file, and the content following. It looks something like this:

---
title: Snivy & Mareep
tags:
  - Art
date: '2023-09-01T10:35:07.322Z'
---

![Charge!!!](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpadilla/image/upload/t_optimize/chrisdpadilla/blog/art/sniviiandmareep_cldzmr.jpg)

Pokémon — the gateway to doodling on math homework.

...

It makes for quick writing and keeps my content portable.

The challenge with this approach, though, is that my images are hosted off site and they are displayed directly through the markdown. A fantastic beginner programmers challenge, if you're ever curios to test out a new language, is to:

• Access a text file
• Parse it
• Return the results

I did just that with a few functions:

export const getImageValuesFromMarkdown = (md) => {
  const regex =
    /!\[[^\]]*\]\((?<filename>.*?)(?=\"|\))(?<optionalpart>\".*\")?\)/g;
  return Array.from(md.matchAll(regex)).map((res) => res[1]);
};


export function getAllArtImages(
  fields = ['content', 'slug', 'tags', 'date'],
  options = {}
) {
  const slugs = getPostSlugs();
  let posts = slugs
    .map((slug) => getPostBySlug(slug, fields))
    // Filter false values (.DS_STORE)
    .filter((post) => post)
    // sort posts by date in descending order
    .sort((post1, post2) => (post1.date > post2.date ? -1 : 1));

  const regex = new RegExp('Art', 'i');
  posts = posts.filter((post) => post.tags?.some((e) => regex.test(e)));

  if (options.filter) {
    posts = posts.filter(options.filter);
  }

  if (options.skip) {
    posts = posts.slice(options.skip);
  }

  if (options.limit) {
    posts = posts.slice(0, options.limit);
  }

  const images = [];
  posts.forEach((post) => {
    const postImages = getImageValuesFromMarkdown(post.content);
    postImages.forEach((src) =>
      images.push({
        src: src,
        slug: post.slug,
      })
    );
  });

  return images;
}

getAllArtImages handles a fair amount of logic for getting all of my markdown files, sorting, and only grabbing the attributes I need. That includes only getting posts with the Art tag!

The interesting part here is down in the forEach loop. There, I'm calling getImageValuesFromMarkdown, which uses a regex to find all of the instances of a markdown denotation for an image. In the file, it looks like this:

![Charge!!!](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpadilla/image/upload/t_optimize/chrisdpadilla/blog/art/sniviiandmareep_cldzmr.jpg)

That all gets massaged into an array of objects with the image source and markdown slug so that the images link to the post.

Displaying Images

From there, it's as simple as calling the method in getServerSideProps() on the page I want to display the grid:

export async function getServerSideProps() {
  const images = getAllArtImages().slice(0, 6);

  return {
    props: {
      images,
    },
  };
}

From there, there's nothing too fancy about it. The react component is simply looping through the images:

import Link from 'next/link';
import React from 'react';

const ArtGrid = ({ images }) => {
  return (
    <>
      <section className="art_display">
        {images.map((image, i) => (
          <article key={image.src} className={`${i > 0 ? 'hideonmobile' : ''}`}>
            <Link href={`/${image.slug}`}>
              <a data-test="musicGridLink">
                <div
                  className="artgridimage"
                  style={{
                    height: '250px',
                    width: '250px',
                    background: 'transparent no-repeat center',
                    backgroundSize: 'cover',
                    margin: 'auto',
                    backgroundImage: `url('${image.src}')`,
                  }}
                />
              </a>
            </Link>
          </article>
        ))}
      </section>
    </>
  );
};

export default ArtGrid;

I'm using the div with a background image set to center the images. Not the most accessible way, but the most-sane way to handle centering images without distorting their aspect ratio.

And that's all there is to it!

Are there tradeoffs to this approach? Why, yes there are! A future concern of mine is for the time when the number of files gets too large, and starts slowing things down. My next step is to take a look into a caching system: Generating the list of images once and saving the results so that this call doesn't happen every time the server receives a request.

A post for another day!

Listen on Youtube

More fingerstyle fun! 🕺👇

Pokémon — the gateway to doodling on math homework.

ALSO!! Today marks a year of me drawing everyday! If you've ever wanted to give it a whirl, let me tell ya, a lot can happen in a year!

Listen on Youtube

🐎

We haven't found the recipe for Ice Cream Cookie Sandwiches in Tears of the Kingdom yet!

Listen on Youtube

🚀 🪐

Too late for the Space Odyssey reference in the Barbie move?

I just think this Moblin hat in Tears of the Kingdom is swell.

I've updated my blog home page to show posts in full instead of just the titles. I'm doing too much art and music making to let all that fun stuff hide behind a click!

I also found out I've posted over 200 times to this blog!! A great milestone! And a fun performance issue to navigate with pagination. :)

Pagination

In a big picture sense, you need these things:

• Loads of data to render, like blog posts
• A way to query it
• A maximum number per page (the interval at which to show data)
• A way to keep track of which page you're on.

That translates to:

• Content
• API/DB Calls
• Limit value
• Skip value

Calculating Skip

Skip value is the most interesting value up there. If you have a limit of 5 posts per page, you'll know your starting place if you know what page you're on. Page 1 will shows items 0-4, so there's no skip.

Page 2, however, starts at 5. So we can get this for each page by multiplying the page number minus 1 by 5.

const skip = limit * (page - 1)

From there, passing that to the DB will get you just the data you need.

Getting Page State

Plenty of ways to do it, though the most user friendly is likely to keep it in your query params. Your url will look something like /blog?p=2. It has the benefit of allowing users to use the back button on their browser.

Here's how you can get that value in getServerSideProps in Next:

export async function getServerSideProps(context) {
  const page = context.query.p || 1;
  const count = getPostsCount();

  const skip = (page - 1) * 5;
  const allPosts = getAllPosts(
    {
      skip,
      limit: 5,
    }
  );

  return {
    props: { allPosts },
  };
}

context is passed from next with the query params (including any that you set yourself through the [id].js naming convention.) Very handy!

Setting Page State

It's as simple as linking to the new url! First I'll get the current page through the client side router:

import { useRouter } from 'next/router';

export default function Blog({ allPosts, count }) {
  const router = useRouter();
  const query = router.query;
  const currentPage = parseInt(query.p) || 1;
  const lastPage = Math.ceil(count / 5);

And then I can use it in my links below.

<div className="pagination-controller" style={{ display: 'flex' }}>
  <div className="left" style={{ flex: '1' }}>
    {currentPage !== 1 && (
      <Link href={`${router.pathname}?p=${currentPage - 1}`}>Back</Link>
    )}
  </div>
  <div className="right" style={{ flex: '1', textAlign: 'right' }}>
    {currentPage < lastPage && (
      <Link href={`${router.pathname}?p=${currentPage + 1}`}>Next</Link>
    )}
  </div>
</div>

You'll have to do the math to add or reduce a page while ensuring you're not going out of bounds. Above I'm hiding the links based on the calculated lastPage.