SSG issues about www

[silent1mezzo]

@LuckeeDev we currently revalidate every minute (https://github.com/my-covid-story/www/blob/main/pages/index.tsx#L39) which pulls all of the new pages down. I'm definitely curious as to why those pages were 404'ing. Two of the three seem to have fixed themselves which is even more curious.

[LuckeeDev]

we currently revalidate every minute (https://github.com/my-covid-story/www/blob/main/pages/index.tsx#L39) which pulls all of the new pages down.

Yep sorry, my bad. I just looked through the code and I saw the revalidation. I also just learned that Vercel supports revalidation!

I'm definitely curious as to why those pages were 404'ing. Two of the three seem to have fixed themselves which is even more curious.

Yes that's weird, the middle one is still 404'ing though.

[LuckeeDev]

Now they're all fixed. Do you think there's a way to avoid this weird behaviour @silent1mezzo?

[mwickett]

I think it's an issue with the error page being returned from getStaticProps being cached on the individual story view. I didn't think that through on your PR @LuckeeDev

We should try removing that catch and see.

[LuckeeDev]

Yeah I can dig more into this issue today :)

[LuckeeDev]

I'm thinking about how we should handle this, which is also somewhat related to #126.

To me, this looks like the best approach, but I'm completely open to any suggestion:

• Instead of returning a success prop inside getStaticProps() for the [id].tsx, we should return an object with the following structure { notFound: true, revalidate: 60 } as described here if the story is not found. This will allow to return a true 404 status to the client and will still revalidate the path every minute.
• While the page is loading in the background, I think that we should display a loading component, to show the user that something is happening, instead of needing to wait until the full page is loaded on the server (this is only needed for the first visit to every page, but it's a nice improvement for the first user which hits that page). This change would be implemented by using fallback: true instead of fallback: 'blocking' as described here.
• [OPTIONAL] Instead of generating all paths via getStaticPaths(), we should only generate the latest 20 - 50 stories and then leave the rest up to incremental static regeneration. In the long run, this will be a massive improvement.

I'm looking forward to hearing your opinion on this! @mwickett @silent1mezzo

P.S: I can work on this as soon as we choose which way to go.