Nodejs.dev: Add blogging functionality to site

[designMoreWeb]

Summary

We have articles on medium and we wanted to see if we can have an active blog through

[joesepi]

Hi all. There has been some discussion around what to do with the Node.js Medium Collection.

My suggestion is to add a blog on the Nodejs.org website and have that be the canonical source for our blog content -- which also happens to be a dev friendly publishing flow -- and syndicate to other platforms such as Dev.to

Ideally, this blog would be a part of the Gatsby app and would inherit all the styling and features.

/cc @WaleedAshraf @codeekage @bnb

[bnb]

@joesepi the intent here is that this site will replace the codebase of nodejs.org eventually, so what you're asserting doesn't quite track with me given that what you're suggesting is what's effectively being proposed.

AFAIK the Medium Collection is cooling off temporarily or permanently. What would be nice would be to have a few different input mechanisms for the blog on this site - primarily, consuming the current RSS feed from https://nodejs.org/en/blog/ as it exists today and markdown source files that are linted and tested. At one point we discussed using Contentful for the site's content, but it does not seem like that's materialized in any meaningful way.

[Trott]

FWIW, I think it would be best to discourage using "blog" to describe what's on the current site and instead use "news". It's basically only used to announce releases and security fixes, which is fine. We don't need to do more than that.

[bnb]

@Trott I don't particularly think "News" is any better than "Blog". I would expect other things to fall in "News" - for example, announcements of work we're doing externally, or discussions of partnerships with other projects/companies like what the Build WG does with the sponsors or what i18n is doing with CrowdIn - that don't meaningfully exist.

I think that given the modern state of the web "Blog" does fit with what content does exist on the site currently, it creates a less confusing path for folks to navigate (I've absolutely never tried to navigate to "news" on any OSS project site when looking for written content about the project including release notes), and it does allow for flexibility in including additional one-off content pieces that project members have produced (see: posts from like what @BethGriggs and @bcoe have done on Medium, for example). We've previously had a split between The Node.js Collection and The Node.js Website, which is why I think the current content there is all changelogs. It would be nice to centralize that into a single place and syndicate it out to additional places for further amplification like DEV and Medium.

[osiux]

Are there any thoughts on how content should be published to this blog? I think the easiest one is using markdown files inside a folder, but there are several CMS that could be used for this.

[WaleedAshraf]

@osiux If we using GitHub for review, then I think markdown will be the best option. We also talked about that users can submit using Google form, and a PR with markdown will be created in the repo.
Previously we also used Google Docs to do the review process, and then the author had to submit final content in "medium supported format". I didn't like that approach.

[bnb]

We've previously discussed using Contentful, but for now we should probably go with GitHub Flavored Markdown checked into the repo. I would avoid trying to use a Google Form for now since this is the official blog managed through GitHub rather than an external platform.