After trying and seemingly failing to get some of the basic gatsby starter templates to work (or even install), I decided to take a step back and decide what I was really looking for in them anyway.
As it turns out, I just wanted a lightweight, performant and accessible web application that would act as a reader for articles written in markdown. With this clearer goal in mind I set to work making this.
The React version and this Svelte version are functionally the exact same, with minor implementation changes. This Svelte version was made for fun and also to see how much smaller the build bundle would be and if there would be any performance differences.
git clone
cd clonedDirectory/
npm install
There is 1 article in /static/articles left as an example. Everything should work out of the box.
Please note that this version writes the about page information directly in that page's html.
npm run build
npm run preview
The articles are .md files written directly in the respository in the /static/articles directory. In order to access them on the /browse page there is a mapping in the articles.ts file in which you give some metadata about the article that looks like this:
{
_id: 0,
title: `The wonderful expansive world of Japanese Denim`,
thumbnail:
'https://assets.bonappetit.com/photos/57c59f63a184a3c9209db716/4:3/w_4911,h_3683,c_limit/hot-pot-donabe-chopsticks.jpg',
created: 'Monday March 27th, 2023',
path: '0',
},s
Please note the path having no file extension in this version.
This app is a standalone web app with no server. The .md files are stored directly in the repository. Even with multiple pictures and tons of markdown, the article files tend to remain under 4-5kb which feels acceptable.
I tried to keep the libraries to an absolute bare minimum. This uses no component libraries The app is viewable on all screen sizes (some extremely esoteric exceptions probably exist) and I tried to make the app as accessible as possible by using all the correct html tags. There is still work to be done with better accessibility though.
All images used in the /.md files are references to outside image hosting services like flickr. I would recommend keeping this convention as it will keep you from saving images locally and bloating the size of your repository.
The /.md articles are rendered using svelte-markdown. There is no compilation or build step as the articles are supplied directly to the renderer.
I have done some of my own component mapping for certain html tags rendered by svelte-markdown and these can be found in the /components folder. It's small things like making the h6 tag into a subtitle type tag for images, doing some image width fixing, etc. Feel free to change anything here to your liking.
Disclaimer - I did not make this with code rendering in mind, so that will require some setup. As is, it does technically render <code /> with the default styling supplied by svelte-markdown but that's it. Please refer to their documentation for more information. It may be possible to do more serious formatting via syntax highlighting, if I am reading this right at least: shiki-code-highlighting
Being more lightweight than the React version, I made no effort to support anything but a very simple list using svelte-bricks.
Since this app is functionally and visually identical to the React version, please refer there for pictures.