Witness me

The Birth of the Moneymaker

The Conception

The year is 2023. Interest rates have been increasing steadily for the past year. Costs have been increasing in tandem. With JPow showing no signs the money printer will be turned back on anytime soon, nor giving any indication that rates will be dumped to perform CPR on my portfolio of growth stocks, the conclusion is clear: I must fend for myself. Although the ads telling me I can get rich performing web surveys seem tempting, it does not seem to scale to the level of wealth I aim to accumulate. Finding myself forced to do some actual research, I dug up an old gold mine of mine. My long neglected Google AdSense account had not been signed into since Google demonetized the youtube video of the song for my russebuss. Leaving me hanging $10 shy of the payout limit, and having enforced a new policy of a minimum of 1000 subscribers to monetize new videos, I thought my relationship with Google was forever broken. Little did I know I would come crawling back some ten years later.

The Birth

With my groundbreaking idea of creating a blog, littering it with ads and driving traffic to it, I have my work cut out for me. Luckily, I pick up some relevant knowledge through my day job as a developer.

Having touched on Next.js in a professional setting, I figured it would be as good a choice as any for my blog. From my googling, static site generation (SSG) is kinda the way to go for something like a blog anyways, so why not choose something that supports that out of the box. What I have not done before is use Vercel's (The company maintaing Next.js and the surrounding ecosystem) platform for hosting. Let me be the first (or millionth) to commend them on the user experience in getting your site up and running. It took some ~15 minutes from I ran npx create-next-app moneymaker until me site was live on collatty.com.

In short I had to do four things to go live:

• Run create-next-app
• Push to Github
• Connect my Github and Vercel accounts, choose the newly created repo and hit deploy
• Add DNS records for www.collatty.com and collatty.com in my DNS provider

Voila - the moneymaker had seen the light of day!

Cleaning the Baby

Continuing with the increasingly lame birth metaphor, I was now the proud father of a blog displaying Next.js default generated front page. Over the years they have pimped it up with some animations. It does however have limited entertainment value after 3 seconds. After ripping out almost everything auto-generated, to start with a clean slate, I'm hardcoding this first post in the index.tsx file. In a later post I will show what that looks like. I tried displaying some css code for you avid readers with the html code element, but gave up after not doing it correctly after a few rounds of googling.

Upbringing

Moving forward I will bring you along on this journey from rags to riches. Starting with this bare-bones meta post, you will hopefully witness the progress from essentially a single html page to a full blown blog with millions of montly readers. As I'm writing this I imagine the blog containing a series of meta posts about the development of the blog. In a parallell track I will create the most click-baity, SEO-optimized posts seen by man to make bank. As an easter egg for those of you who made it this far, I can reveal that I at some point plan to integrate ChatGPT into the blog. That is my grand plan. Crawl Stack Overflow for the most popular questions, having ChatGPT write out blog posts for said question and sit back and watch the money flow in.

Peace ✌️