colbyfayock

the app relies on it's storage, image composition, and AI features

there's no reason someone couldn't swap out the underlaying tech and take advantage of the UI, but it's a big undertaking

it's not uncommon for Open Source projects to rely on non OSS services. the project itself is Open Source which is where the designation comes from

as far as free, it's absolutely free to spin up. it does require registration (like any other service), but Cloudinary has a generous free tier. it was made pretty clear on the website and repository it relied on that service

just for transparency, i work at Cloudinary, but I stand by the above whether it was Cloudinary or another service

will be adding more features, including search, over time!

my first past was mainly focused on initial organization and editing, including Creations (which i was most excited about)

Bridges the gap of trying to use Cloudinary in Next.js

Particularly important with Next.js 13 which removes the globally configurable loader and removes the built-in Cloudinary loader (amongst others).

- Automatically optimize images and deliver in modern formats

- Remove backgrounds from images

- Dynamically add image and text overlays to images

- AI-based cropping and resizing

- Transform images using color and effects

- Generate Open Graph Social Media cards on the fly

- Drop-in Upload Widget

Colby from Cloudinary here what framework / tooling are you using? Sorry you haven't had a great experience with the UI, but if you stick around with Cloudinary, I would suspect there's a lot of solutions where the processing / uploading can be automated, such as using a Cloudinary plugin within a headless CMS (like Contentful) where you just use a URL or plugins like the Gatsby plugin: https://github.com/cloudinary-devs/gatsby-transformer-cloudi... (only supports images so far)

If you're on the Netlify side of things, I have a plugin there that automates images https://github.com/colbyfayock/netlify-plugin-cloudinary/

There's a ton others too: https://cloudinary.com/documentation/cms_ecommerce_integrati... https://cloudinary.com/documentation/partner_built

Hope that helps, happy to brainstorm other ideas as well!

Definitely agree!

WRT deploying Next.js apps, I typically go static first because it makes it easier, exporting it to static files

But there are some other options I've found:

Next.js on Netlify works great if you want to deploy to Netlify: https://github.com/netlify/next-on-netlify

I haven't tried this, but an option to deploy with AWS Lambda and Serverless Framework https://codedaily.io/tutorials/184/Deploy-a-NextJS-App-With-...

there are a lot of good options here: https://headlesscms.org/

i personally use Netlify CMS for my website. it's not as feature rich as some other options, but for a personal blog, it gets the job done, and it's open source

sorry i heard there are some issues with the site but i haven't been able to reproduce to fix :(

please let me know if you hvae more questions!

thanks - thats a good point - i plan on releasing the first tutorial free actually - i just haven't had the time to get that out yet, that'll be hopefully posted on freecodecamp.org in the next couple of days

i think there's a lot of truth to that - but they do is so fantastically well

there are a LOT of pain points to deal with rolling out all that is included with the base netlify offering

hosting a static site is pretty easy - but configuring routing between cloudfront and s3 can be complicated so that the reequests don't always reference the root index.html

creating an autodeploy infrastructure can be challenging as well, tools like github actions might make that a little easier, but there are a lot of considerations there

it also makes these kinds of solutions more accessible to developers who might not have the understanding or interest to set up that kind of infrastructure. front end devs can build sites, connect, and go with little fuss

i think thats a fair point but there's a lot of benefit from from that. they're able to focus on making a great CMS

there are also some open source solutions that are great. Netlify CMS works really well for a very basic page / blog management solution

a lot of the headless CMS solutions also offer generous free tiers, making it perfect for web devs to spin up a free instance for their personal sites and projects

that's so strange - sorry you're experiencing that. im not having any issues on my mac's safari :( glad FF is working for you though

i'll try to see if i can figure out a way to reproduce

for sure - that's definitely a valid solution. it all depends on the goals you're trying to meet

Andy Bell is fantastic, great rec

i think there's varying levels of complexity to the different solutions available jamstack or not

Jamstack, the complexity might be maintaining different services, such as a headless cms and the front end. the output though is static files that you can dump into static hosting pretty easily

on the other hand, you might have a serverful solution thats all in one stack. you run into other complexities with that like having to worry moreso about scaling and managing that server for traffic

there are tradeoffs between the 2. jamstack isn't a perfect solution but it has a lot of benefits. it's also relatively young in it's architectural lifecycle, so i would imagine a lot of these pain points to be worked out as it matures

the book tries to get into both the good and the challenging

:o where are you seeing that, on the homepage? it's loading for me

For the book - I don't think there really is a high expectation of knowledge, except maybe just general web development from a high level. The hope for the informational part is to get anyone acquainted with it

For the tutorials - the expectation is familiarity with Javascript and probably React, given the examples are React, though I walk through each steps with the code changes