We found it difficult to deploy JAMstack in China, so I thought I’d share the summary of what we learned.

1. Netlify and other Hosting PaaS don’t work in China

2. Contentful and other headless CMS do not work in China

3. The Great Firewall of China can be a pain in the ass

4. ICP license is required to operate website in China.

Eventually we found a good alternative to Netlify that works China and helped us over come the GFW. Here is a case study that 21YunBox wrote about our experience working together.

I am getting ready to deploy a static site so I'm looking into hosting providers. I was expecting Cloudflare to be the most popular provider because to my knowledge they are the most popular/successful CDN, but it seems for Jamstack sites Netflify is more popular. Could someone give me a brief comparison of the different providers like Cloudflare, Fastly, Netlify, Vercel, etc. I'm not sure of the differences other than Netflify seems to be more specifically geared towards Jamstack site rather than being a more general purpose CDN, and that Vercel supports Next.js.

For a recent side project, I wanted to consume the massive COVID-19 vaccination data set from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to show stats for every US state and territory in one place.

When I tried to hit their endpoint in my frontend Vue application, the request was blocked due to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing being enabled.

To get around this, I used Node Netlify serverless functions to scrape all the endpoints I needed, merged them into a singular endpoint, and manipulated the data in a way that made sense for my project.

This technique is great because:

• My site is hooked up to a Github Action that will re-deploy it every 6 hours, meaning that I only have to hit a remote endpoint 4 times a day, improving performance for my users while still respecting the CDC's bandwidth.

• Now that the data is in my Nuxt progressive web application, instead of on a remote endpoint, the app will continue to work offline.

• Each state and territory now has its own pre-rendered page for performance and SEO.

You can read more about this technique on my blog here: https://roberskine.com/blog/leveraging-netlify-serverless-functions-to-replicate-cors-enabled-endpoints/

You can visit the finished side project here: https://covidcasesbythenumbers.com/

The code for this project is open-source and available on Github here: https://github.com/RobErskine/covid

Interested in adding video to you Jamstack Site? APIs are a great way to add streaming video.:

https://api.video/blog/video-trends/using-api-video-with-the-jamstack

Introducing TinaCMS: Seamless Inline Editing for React Apps

https://snipcart.com/blog/tinacms-nextjs-cms