SuperEffective.gg (PokéPC)

DevLog #2

Added 2022-09-27 00:39:45 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone, I've been very busy in the last week rewriting many aspects of the new website. Keep reading if you want to know more about the tech details :)

1. The CMS (Content Management System)

I wanted to move away from Contentful to have just a local CMS fully based on FrontMatter and MDX markdown. This will let me not depend on a particular cloud CMS platform and I can move to my own hosted one in the future. Contentful is very expensive once you hit the free-tier limits. I finally managed to have something working with NextJS.

I also want to get rid of the "News" section completely and covert that part into a "Blog" with more site-focused posts and updates rather than posting about Pokemon news, which is what other popular sites are already covering. It's a lot of effort to cover the Pokemon news and I prefer to focus on what I do best.

2. Users Authentication & Database

In an effort to move away from Google Firebase as the login and database provider, I decided to implement my own based on "next/auth", with a SQL database hosted in DigitalOcean (which is around 10 USD/month for the base tier).

There is still a lot of work to do here (like migrating the users), but at least I am happy to have the basis.

Login system will change from oauth-based to email-based and you won't require a social network to login anymore. On the new site version, you will be asked to provide an email first the time you login with your old account.

This deep change will probably increase the Vercel costs (as more serverless functions will be called), but will introduce many other benefits like better data privacy (Firebase is very bad for that) and the possibility to do complex queries on the dex data that are not currently possible with Firebase, or let the users to backup/import their dex data.

I've been also working on: