BestOnDesk

What was BestOnDesk?

BestOnDesk was an Italian blog, created for the office workers, to give the best advices about products, but also articles on motivation, personal growth and personal finance. The idea came from a friend of mine, Marco Campagnolo, who wrotes the article, while I was working on the code side.

Website

The website was first built with Wordpress, but after we grew in terms of traffic, we decided to revamp the UI and the code, so we switched to Gatsby in March 2021. I decided to keep Wordpress as CMS for the articles, because we had more than 400 articles at that time and it was easier to manage them with Wordpress. So, Gatsby was loading articles from Wordpress during build using GraphQL.

Infrastructure

Firstly we were hosting the Wordpress website on a free EC2 on AWS on an OpenLiteSpeed server, which had a good cache system with LiteSpeed Cache plugin.
After we switched to Gatsby, we decided to host the website on S3, behind a Cloudfront distribution, still on AWS but with infrastructure wrote on Terraform.

Collaborations

We collaborated with some startups like 4Books and we were affiliate of Amazon, Fiverr, BigCommerce, GearBest, SkyScanneer and some other companies.

Telegram channel

We also had a channel for Amazon deals, managed by a bot, which was scanning Amazon multiple times per day to find the best deals for our users. The deals were real, because I created a script which checked the price based on the previous prices in time, checking the discount with a logarithmic expression.

Why we closed the project

After 3 years of activity, we decided to close the project because in the last months the earnings went down and we didn't have enough time to keep the articles updated anymore.