# What is a blog? - **Technical**: A page with set of posts usually shown in reverse order - **User Needs**: Show news/updates; usually more polished or "featured" content (not so much a notebook) Note: The functionality of a blog and a news section are pretty much identical from a technical perspective. So in everything we write here about blogs also can be used to implement news. # Job Stories ### Overall story When publishing my site/garden I often want a section of news or articles so that people can read the latest updates or articles. This high-level story breaks down into two parts: - Index page listing posts - Way to create/designate blog posts ### Index page When publishing my site, I want to have a blog/article index page that lists my articles in latest first order. - Chronicle listing in backwards order - Read more / infinite scroll (no pagination) - see [Google's Pagination Documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading) - Search etc **not** necessary ### Creating blogs/articles When publishing my site, I want a way to create or designate pages as blog posts so that they show up on the blog/article index page. - Can have this as a dedicated folder e.g. `/blog/` - Or just a special type of note e.g. there is frontmatter field: `blog: true` or something - Frontmatter: some requirements e.g. to have a `date` field for the publication date. # MVP Design ## Features - Simple way to make a note into a blog/article - Simple way to show a list of blog posts in reverse date order. Specifically: - Can make a blog post by creating something in a blog folder OR adding `type: blog` (case insensitive?) - List of blog posts show up under `/blog/` (with pagination) - Presentation - simple and functional (cf Next.js or Vercel blog, or Tailwind CSS) - Pagination - infinite scroll would be nice. ## Implementation As a default, follow Pliny however we have quite a few changes. We cover specific items. ### Index page Make the searchable blogs list a component, which users can use in any of their pages - even on the home page. - This way it's an "opt-in" out of the box - "/blog" URL is not reserved for the blogs list. - We could even use query params for the search terms. - Regarding pagination: see section below. Summary: don't have pagination just load more / infinite scroll. ### Individual blog page - Use layout approach instead of having `blog/[...slug]` - Use our SEO or Pliny's? **Can we use our own SEO (do we need to update it?)** - Frontmatter for blog: TODO ### Pagination We probably want to take a look at [Google's Pagination Documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading). Discussion (now maybe irrelevant if we go for load more etc): - Change pagination to use query params instead of `/page/` paths. For this, we would only need a single `blog/index.js` page. **Not really sure what we gain from this**. ### Questions - Do we want to support blog pages in the current (default) app template, or do we want to create a new "blog" template? **Use the current template**. - Do we provide an example / Obsidian template for blog (in docs for now) **yes we do**. - **How to make it opt-in**: **For now, ok to make this hard-coded (KISS)**. - Idea A (simpler): /pages/blog could be renamed to e.g. /pages/_blog and we could define a new property in the config file for specifying what path should point to it (could be `/blog` by default) and use next redirects to handle it. **I don't think redirects are good**. - Idea B: Create a new package, an add-on that could be added by `npx flowershow add blog`, which would create /pages/blog and add Blog type to content layer config.