Adding analytics to your website is critical for being able to have a better understanding of how your visitors use your app including gauging performance and finding usability issues. Let’s see how we can use Plausible, a privacy-focused analytics tool, to gain insights into our Next.js App Router apps. What is Plausible? Plausible considers itself...
Emails are one of the most impactful ways to communicate to an audience but it’s also one of the most challenging formats for developers to build consistent and great experiences. But now we have a tool in our belt that takes advantage of the UI framework we love, React, and brings it front and center...
Sitemaps and RSS feeds may feel like dated technology, but they’re critical components of making a blog or content-driven site discoverable. Luckily, Next.js makes it super easy in the App Router to get dynamic feeds set up. What is a Sitemap? A sitemap is ususally an XML document that includes a comprehensive list of links...
As the world becomes more connected, it’s even more critical to be able to communicate in languages other than our own. Using simple browser APIs and tools like OpenAI’s GPT, we can create a custom translator app that translates whatever we say to a wide variety other languages. What is the Web Speech API The...
Nearly all websites have some form of navigation and a common pattern is styling the active link, or the link that represents the current page. This is typically simple with easy access to the current path, but how does that work with the Next.js App Router? Tip: We step through a bit of context before...
One of the biggest pain points of building a blog is figuring out where to write and mange your posts. There is no shortage of Headless CMS options out there, so its important to figure out what makes them special, including a great UX and… one that promotes your blog for you? What is Hashnode?...
One of my favorite ways of interacting with Cloudinary is using the Node.js SDK. But how do you use Node inside of a React app? Up until now, it was quite challenging, but the game has changed with server components. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to use the Node SDK to build a...
Integration tests are one of the most reliable methods to harden your app, but it’s missing one thing… what the visitors are actually seeing in the UI! How can we use Visual Regression Testing to level up our integration tests and gain confidence in our work? We’ll take a look at Applitools Eyes and how...
AI is here and as developers, we need to use it to empower us in our work. How can we use tools like the OpenAI SDK with generative images and language models to create a completely custom person or character? What is OpenAI? OpenAI is a currently non-profit organization focused on AI research. They’ve made...
Databases are a critical, sometimes painful, component of a website or app. We need a way to store information to build personalized experiences, but databases can be complex and tricky to pull the data we need efficiently. Enter Xata, which takes a new approach storing data automatically in multiple types of stores (relational DB, search/aggregations...