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feat(post): new home for the lb blog
Signed-off-by: Rifa Achrinza <25147899+achrinza@users.noreply.github.com>
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‎blog/2022/2022-04-03-new-home-for-the-loopback-blog.md‎

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---
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title: New Home for the LoopBack Blog
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date: 2022-04-13
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slug: new-home-for-the-loopback-blog
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authors: achrinza
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tags: [Meta]
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---
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After a long hiatus, the LoopBack Blog has gotten a new home! Learn how it came
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to be and how we managed to modernise blogging stack along the way.
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<!--truncate-->
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As part of the planning for LoopBack moving to OpenJS Foundation, there have
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been discussions around finding a new home for the blog, parting from the
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strongloop.com web site. A few alternatives had brought up, such as having the
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blog posts as part of the loopback.io repo, using a third party blog site and
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creating a blog site in a separate repo.
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## Coming Up With a Plan
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Putting the blog posts in the loopback.io repo is a natural progression, since
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all the documentation and text-based content will be in the same repo. The
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concern is that is Jekyll-based. Although it worked fine and integrated well
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with GitHub Pages, many of the maintainers were not well-versed in the world of
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Ruby. This was compounded by shell scripts that pulled data from other Git
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Repositories and modified the site as part of the build process. Hence, a lot of
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time was spent trying to understand how the website was put together and
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figuring out the best way to tweak it to integrate the new blog.
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The "Strong Blog" was also written with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. Hence
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lifting and shifting was a real possibility that we contemplated. However,
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the slow build times and the maintainers' unfamiliarity with Ruby and Jekyll
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meant that we realised that the website's current stack wasn't worth keeping
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around in the long run. At the same time, performing a full migration of the
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website, documentation, and blog in one go was too daunting of a task for the
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maintainers who were already working on the project on their own time.
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The idea of using a third-party service such as [Medium](https://www.medium.com)
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was also considered. However utlimately, the lack of control over the interface,
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the inability to place it in the same domain name as the main website and
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documentation, and the frustration that stem from a reader being forced to use
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a third-party service meant that it was quickly off the table.
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As a result, we decided to come to a compromise.
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## Picking A Blogging Stack
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After some deliberation we decided to create a hybrid stack which left the
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website and documentation with Jekyll, and use
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[Docosaurus 2](https://docusaurus.io) as the new blogging platform. We found
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Docusaurus to be a good fit as it is a Facebook-maintained open source project
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which was written on top of React. Besides its benefit of speedy build times,
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this JavaScript-based stack provides more opportunities for extensibility and a
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reduced barrier for contributing and tweaking. The first-class support for MDX
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was also a plus as it meant we were able to copy over most of our posts with
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only a few tweaks, and the ability to generate the blog as build artifacts made
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it compatible with the Jamstack-eque system of GitHub Pages.
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Thanks to the amazing work done by [Diana](https://github.com/dhmlau), all of
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the LoopBack 4 blog posts from 2019 and 2020 were migrated to Docusaurus. With
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her work, we were able to quickly build and see the new blog coming together
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with all of the past blog posts populating the blog.
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## Merging Jekyll and Docusaurus
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When we started building the blog, we hosted it on GitHub Pages in its own Git
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Repository and served it in its own sub-domain. This allowed us to quickly build
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and patch any bugs that may have cropped up. However the end-goal was to host it
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under the same domain as the main website and documentation:
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https://loopback.io/blog. Hence, we had to create a solution which merged the
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new blog with the exsitng website codebase.
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This solution? A shell script!
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Since we already had a precedence for using shell scripts to pull in data from
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other Git Repositories, I've decided to write one to do the same thing, but this
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time, specifically for the blog. This script clones the
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[`loopbackio/loopback-blog` Git Repository](https://github.com/loopbackio/loopback-blog),
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generates the blog's build artifacts, and copies it over to the `blog` directory
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of the Jekyll website. There's additional logic in there to make it more
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fool-proof and less verbose but in essence, that was what it did - Clone, build,
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and copy. You can also view the
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[source code](https://github.com/loopbackio/loopback.io/blob/8968cd6860c09a852ee4fd9ce07c7a1db3ce7771/update-blog.sh)
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yourself if you'd like to see how it was done. Over time, we hope to refine this
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further and make it more reliable, such as using Git Submodules instead of a
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clean clone on every build.
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## Future Work
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As it stands, we now have a blog that all of the maintainers can now contribute
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to. With this change, we now have revived a new way for us, the maintianers, to
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engage with our community and we hope that the blog posts can complement the
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existing documentation and community channels such as Slack, GitHub
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Discussions, and the mailing list.
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This is just the first step in modernising our website stack. There's still
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plenty of work to do, and it's our vision to fully migrate our stack to one
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powered by the JavaScript ecosystem.
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## Upcoming Blog Series: Maintainers' Testimonial
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With the launch of our new blog, we're excited to announce an upcoming blog
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series where the maintainers can share their expriences and journey in adopting
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LoopBack 4. Through this series, we hope to share with the community the unique
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perspectives of those who work closely on LoopBack 4, not only as users but as
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maintainers as well.
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Don't miss out on future blog posts by subscribing to our
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[RSS](https://loopback.io/blog/rss.xml) or
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[Atom](https://loopback.io/blog/atom.xml) feeds which contain the full articles.

‎blog/authors.yml‎

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name: Biniam Admikew
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title: LoopBack Maintainer
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url: https://github.com/b-admike
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image_url: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/13950637
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image_url: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/13950637
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achrinza:
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name: Rifa achrinza
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title: LoopBack Maintainer
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url: https://github.com/achrinza
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image_url: https://avatars3.githubusercontent.com/u/25147899

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