Cool. I'm actually building something very similar @ http://evanplaice.com. I use Markdown/JSON for all of the content. Markdown files can easily be embedded in a page using the <ng2-markdown> directive I wrote. The source is @ http://github.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com.
I'm planning to eventually extract the good bits, and adapt it to work with Jekyll files. Front-matter support is the last major road block.
Google shouldn't have any issue indexing AJAX-loaded content. On my site it's the Angular2 router that's really screwing SEO. You can test it out using the 'Fetch as Google' tool.
5 seconds browser loading. Then blank screen for about 5 seconds. Then a spinner for about 3 seconds.
No matter how much optimisation you're doing, you're still destroying the progressive loading of HTML pages and the ability for my browser to tell me how my page is loading.
It may be a fun project, but it's not based on sound technical decisions, in my humble opinion.
I see you are getting some negative feedback, haha. I think the main problem at this point isn't due client-rendering, but the large prerequisite files. Gzipping your JavaScript would trim a MB or more. Putting the static assets on a CDN (or enabling gzip yourself) would cut the render time by 2/3rds.
Semantic UI adds 700KBs of CSS, which seems like a lot more than your site should need. Even if this were a static rendered site, the browser would delay rendering anything until the CSS was downloaded.
Haha. I figured 'working on' would signal that this isn't 'production ready' yet.
Guess I should choke down my excitement and stay in stealth mode until I'm ready next time.
The entire app is server-less and hosted on a S3 bucket.
Gzipping the content should be an easy addition to the build process.
I'm using approximately 2% of what Semantic-UI is capable of. Fortunately, Semantic-UI provides a set of tools to trim it down to a production-ready bundle.
In addition, Google will likely trim more of the fat from Angular2 in upcoming releases.
The big one I'm concerned about is Rxjs. The size of the lib is massive considering it only provides support for observables and observable extensions.
Trust me, I'm painfully aware of how slow it is right now.
Thanks for the feedback though. I do appreciate it.
Feel free to try it again. The css and js are now merged and concatenated into one and gzipped. Total size of both is now 366KB
The time to bootstrap the app is about 1.5 seconds. There's room for improvement but I don't expect any massive gains since I can't isomorphically pre-render without a server back-end.
I'm planning to eventually extract the good bits, and adapt it to work with Jekyll files. Front-matter support is the last major road block.
Google shouldn't have any issue indexing AJAX-loaded content. On my site it's the Angular2 router that's really screwing SEO. You can test it out using the 'Fetch as Google' tool.