How I'm building this website 🛠

I recently found that I'm using a bunch of dependencies to build this website, and so in order to better understand what we have under the hood, I wanted to do some cataloging.

Link to this headingThe technology

• Hosting: Vercel (free, hobby plan)
• Version control: GitHub (free plan)
• Static site generator framework: Nextra with the Blog Theme
  • Why: write blog posts in MDX
• Web development framework: Next.js, which itself works on top of React
• Design system/component library: Chakra UI
• Code editor: Visual Studio Code

I'm not using TypeScript because I like to keep things simple here. In all seriousness, I'm doing this for fun and to learn a thing or two.

The previous version of my site involved editing .html files (containing inline css, js w/ jQuery) over SFTP to a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet.

Overall, I'm not paying ongoing tooling costs right now which is cool too.

Link to this headingFuture outlook

There are some near-term changes I can see coming up for this site.

For starters, I can already see a few cases where having a database would be convenient for pushing and caching data, without having the site rebuild. I currently push a constants.js file for a few things, but there are a few additional data integrations I'm interested in making that would benefit from a different persistence model. If I do this, I will likely use Upstash's Redis product which has a sufficient, free plan as well.

As well, I'd like to customize some of the blog behaviour in Nextra, but with Nextra's v2 in beta that looks to be getting close to release, I'd rather hold off on forking anything or customizing. And the reality is that I might just switch off Nextra entirely if I have enough to customize and the direction of Nextra doesn't match my growing requirements.

Fortunately, most of the effort on this site so far is quite portable, as I've mostly been writing React components and MDX so I could likely switch to something like next-mdx-remote without having to lose anything I've written so far (just adding some of the layout and mdx loading functionality I got for free from Nextra).

And ultimately part of the enjoyment of building this website is in experimenting with new tech, so I don't mind the dynamicism.