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Ventures and Vignettes:A Travel Blog with a Customized Rich Text Editor

Ventures and Vignettes is a travel blog that features a unique WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) content editor, designed to offer an exceptional content creation experience.

Ventures and Vignettes: A Travel Blog with a Customized Rich Text Editor

Overview

Ventures and Vignettes is a personal side project that I undertook to address a specific need for a highly customizable and powerful rich text editor in the context of a travel blog. As a frontend engineer with a passion for aesthetics and comprehensive development, I aimed to create a platform that not only provides engaging and visually appealing content but also excels in usability and SEO performance.

The project involved a full-stack development process, utilizing modern technologies such as React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and MongoDB. The blog features advanced search functionalities, robust admin capabilities, and a unique WYSIWYG content editor designed to enhance content creation and management. Through this project, I have expanded my skill set and gained valuable experience in full-stack development, from initial design to deployment.

Mission

Content creation often requires a flexible and powerful rich text editor, a need my co-working editors frequently encountered at my full-time company. Our company primarily attracts users through meticulously curated written content, which demands a high level of customization in design. This challenge inspired me to develop a solution.

As a frontend engineer with an eye for aesthetics, I sought to undertake a project that encompassed the entire development process, from design to frontend and backend implementation. Thus, the Ventures and Vignettes blog project was born as a personal side project.

Process

1. Identifying the needs & objectives

The project began with a clear need for a customized rich text editor that could handle highly curated content with various design elements. My experience with content creation challenges at my full-time company highlighted this necessity.

    2. Setting Objectives

    I defined the primary goals for this travel blog as follow:

    • Create a visually appealing, mobile-responsive travel blog
    • Develop a powerful, flexible rich text editor.
    • Implement robust admin features for content and user management.
    • Ensure high SEO performance for all pages.

    3. Informal Research

    Since this project was a personal side project, I conducted the following informal research to gather insights:

    • Technical Exploration:

      Reviewed various technologies and frameworks that could support the project’s requirements.

    • Text Editor Options:

      Explored different text editor libraries and ultimately chose Slate.js for its ability to create highly customized content blocks.

    4. Features

    I identified key features for the blog and the text editor. After listing all potential features, I focused on those that would best achieve the major objective of creating a WYSIWYG rich text editor that enhances content SEO.

      For the Blog

    • Keyword search
    • Featured posts slider
    • Latest posts
    • Tag lists
    • Comprehensive post list with category filters
    • Pagination
    • Post details with rich content presentation
    • Breadcrumb navigation for better SEO
    • Table of contents for enhanced readability
    • Clickable hashtags
    • Related posts for improved UX and SEO
    • Comment section with admin approval for moderation

      • For the Text Editor

    • Basic text styling: bold, italic, underline, alignment, etc.
    • Support for semantic HTML elements like headings
    • Image inclusion
    • Link embedding
    • Main featured image
    • SEO-related features: slug, summary, tags
    • Output as a structured object for easy rendering

    5. Design

    Designing the website from scratch was a challenging yet rewarding experience. It deepened my appreciation for the designers I have worked with in the past.

    Initial design work on Figma

    Initial design work on Figma

      6. Technology Research

      For this full-stack project, I selected Next.js for its seamless integration of frontend and backend capabilities. The most critical decision was choosing a text editor library. After evaluating several options, I chose Slate.js for its flexibility in developing customizable content blocks.

        Tech Stack

        Result

        Ventures and Vignettes has evolved into a beautifully designed, mobile-responsive blog. It offers multiple ways for users to search posts by keywords, hashtags, and categories, enhancing the user experience and accessibility.

        Admin's category list management page

        Admin's category list management page

        Admin Features

        • Comment Management: The admin can review and approve user-written comments, ensuring that spam and unwanted advertisements are filtered out before appearing on the site.
        • Category Management: Admins have the ability to add, delete, and manage categories, maintaining a well-organized content structure.
        • User Role Management: The admin can assign roles, promoting other users to admin or editor status as needed.
        Text Editor: You can get a secret preview at venturesandvignettes.com/admin/posts/create

        Text Editor: You can get a secret preview at venturesandvignettes.com/admin/posts/create

        The Text Editor

        • The custom rich text editor is integrated into the admin’s post-writing feature, allowing writers to publish posts exactly as they are formatted in the editor. This ensures that the final content is presented as intended, maintaining the integrity and aesthetic quality of the posts.

        SEO Optimization

        • Ventures and Vignettes boasts a perfect score of 100 for SEO on every page, as measured by Lighthouse. This high SEO score is achieved through optimized content structure, efficient use of keywords, and robust metadata management, ensuring that the blog ranks highly in search engine results and attracts more visitors.

        Final Site

        https://venturesandvignettes.com

        https://venturesandvignettes.com

        Learning

        • Enhanced front-end skills through the creation of a responsive and visually appealing UI using React and Tailwind CSS.
        • Gained proficiency in server-side rendering and static site generation with Next.js, optimizing the blog for SEO and performance.
        • Improved back-end capabilities with MongoDB, focusing on seamless integration with the frontend.
        • Learned to manage full-stack development independently, from initial design concepts to final deployment and maintenance.

        Challenges

        1. Balancing rich media content with fast load times, ensuring an optimal user experience without compromising performance.
        2. Developing a versatile text editor that meets user needs while allowing for maximum creative expression.
        3. Overcoming the complexities of design.

        Conclusion

          The Ventures and Vignettes travel blog and its custom text editor proved successful. It allowed me to experiment with new technologies and laid the groundwork for a new project at my company. This experience has been invaluable in expanding my skills and understanding of full-stack development.