A hands-on exploration of styled-components by building a HackerNews feed replica, constructing reusable components with embedded styling.

Key Components

Story Component

The smallest unit displays individual HackerNews entries with two sections:

Header contains:

• Rank number
• Story title
• Link to source

Footer includes:

• Score/points
• Submitting user
• Timestamp
• Link to HackerNews discussion

Implementation Approach

Rather than managing separate CSS files and class names, we embed styling directly within component definitions using ES6 tagged template literals.

The Header component wraps child elements in a flex container, while individual styled components handle the rank, title, and external link. The FooterLink component manages opening links in new windows through the attrs function.

StoryList Component

This component renders multiple Story items from an array, calculating rank based on array index since the actual API data lacks this information initially.

Setup Instructions

create-react-app hackernews-client
npm install -S styled-components
npm start

Key Learning

Once you get the hang of it, you want to make everything a styled component. The approach eliminates class-name management while keeping styling adjacent to component logic.