Free Time Updates

This is a React/Next.js website set up to be hosted on a serverless environment on AWS.

The javascript frontend connects to a few AWS Lambda functions written in NodeJS to process the contact form and provide content for the tweets that can be sent from this site.

I went through this tutorial (https://dev.to/adnanrahic/a-crash-course-on-serverless-side-rendering-with-reactjs-nextjs-and-aws-lambda-13ed) and then started customizing the code to get a better understanding of how it all works.

Authors

• @joshglazer

Inspiration

When I built this application I was gearing up for a React/Next.js project at the company where I worked at the time, and wanted to tinker with those technologies before starting a "real" project. A few years before, I had made a joke/parody website called Free Time Updates using Drupal, but was not able to dedicate time towards keeping up with the security updates, so I had to take the site offline in order to make sure my hosting account was not vulnerable to attacks. I decided to recreate that website using Next.js and AWS Lambda as a learning experience and to gain a better understanding of the technologies used in this application.

Demo

A live demo of Free Time Updateas is available at https://www.freetimeupdates.com/.

Run Locally

Clone the project

  git clone git@github.com:joshglazer/freetimeupdates-react.git

Go to the project directory

  cd freetimeupdates-react

Install dependencies

  npm install

Start the server

  npm start

Deployment

Before you deploy this application, make sure you set up the AWS Command Line Interface on your local machine.

To deploy this project run

  npm run deploy

Development Process

Design

When I thought of this website, I pictured the old infomercials from the 90's with a blue and yellow screen, an 800 number, and a note about how many easy payments you can make in order to purchase the product that is being sold. I used that blue and yellow color scheme as inspiration for my design.

Integrations

This application integrates with a few custom AWS Lambda functions to process the content form and provide some content to the front-end.

It also uses google charts to present some of the information in the "research" section of the site.