Building a Blog with Elixir and Phoenix (jola.dev)

by shintoist 13 comments 108 points
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13 comments

[−] mikhmha 50d ago
Wow. I am so glad for this post because I am literally planning to do this today. I've been building an MMO using Elixir as the backend, and currently the main website is a static site a friend made for me using Vue.js. Mostly it just functions as a way to display blog posts that show new updates to the game. And it contains a button to "launch" the browser client for the game which is just a redirect to a page hosted on a cloudflare bucket that contains the game files.

But I figure now is the time to update the site. I don't know enough about Vue.js and I'm more of a backend programmer anyways. I've been putting it off for so long. I always figured the site would be temporary until I put in the time to learn some Pheonix. Its a bit strange being in the Elixir world working on a project that doesn't touch Phoenix in any way. To me its like an entirely new domain for a language that I consider myself "skilled" in. Whereas for others Elixir = Pheonix. So this write-up really helps remove the overwhelming feeling I've had about starting, because I don't need liveview or ecto or all the other stuff but most of the learning resources focus on that.

I'm kind of excited to start now. Eventually it will be a not-so static website that will maybe interface with some exposed endpoints running on the main game server so I can show stats like "live players" or a "live map" of the game on the main site. But for now it will remain completely isolated from the game server.

[−] Joel_Mckay 50d ago
The Phoenix framework is great, and I wish it was more popular.

Specifically how Channels trivially solve several common problems:

https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/channels.html

The minimal wire traffic on a Phoenix deployment usually surprises people at first. Best of luck =3

[−] thibaut_barrere 50d ago
I am considering doing something similar, but embedding “livebook” bits so that I can run code & liveviews right in the middle of my posts in the future.

Curious to know if anyone went that route (or something similar) already!

[−] matthewsinclair 50d ago
Congrats! Nice work. I’m a fellow “Phoenix |> Elixir” fan and built something similar here [0]. I’m still ironing the kinks out of mine, but I’ve moved all of my personal sites over to it and it’s been running for almost a year now.

[0]: https://laksa.io

[−] dottjt 50d ago
When I was a lot younger I built a very big and complex platform with Phoenix. Although it was a technical marvel, it's one of my big regrets as far as the tech stack I went with, because it's now useless for my actual work now a decade later.

In retrospect, I wish I had built it with C#/.NET

[−] timc3 50d ago
Do you mean because you can’t use Elixir/Phoenix for work? Because I don’t quite understand, doing a big project and learning/using a particular tech stack should have many transferable skills.
[−] vovavili 50d ago
Weren't Elixir devs consistently ranked to be some of the most well-paid ones year by year? Sounds like you're underselling yourself.
[−] functional_dev 50d ago
Anyhow, Elixir has it's rebirth now due to Nx
[−] boundlessdreamz 50d ago
Why is it useless?
[−] lalo2302 50d ago
Have you thought on making your markdown files publicly available for AI to read your blog posts?