Why the Blog API Was Returning 500And How We Fixed It)

If you ran the Next.js frontend with NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=http://12700.1 and got 500 Internal Server Error, the cause was simple: the frontend was talking to the wrong server.

Two Different Servers

1 backend (API)**
Serves /api/posts, /api/categories, /api/site, etc. This is the real blog API, hosted at https://lilacpearlsblogs-backend.vercel.app. The frontend needs this to load posts and categories. 2 MCP server (in lilacpearls_blog_site_3CP)
A Cursor/Claude MCP server that calls the blog backend to create/update/delete posts. It does not serve /api/posts or /api/categories. If you run it with uvicorn main:app, you also get an error—because the app lives in server.py, so the correct command is uvicorn server:app.

The Fix

• Frontend: Set NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL=https://lilacpearlsblogs-backend.vercel.app in .env so the site uses the real blog API. No local server needed for the blog to work.
• MCP: Use the LilacPearls Blog MCP in Cursor (with BACKEND_URL and MCP_API_KEY). For local HTTP debugging, run *uvicorn server:app --reload --port80 in the MCP folder.

Takeaways

Server and API are not the same. Point the frontend at the blog API; use the MCP to post from Cursor. Once that's clear, the 500s go away.