It's been a while...
My first stab at this blog was easy to get off the ground, but quite sloppy to maintain. No content management, just html. It worked ( thanks to Tailwind Typography ) but I never wanted to write in the jumbled mess.
The journey begins
I thought about moving to MDX, but I can't stand writing markdown. There's nothing less inspiring than the feeling of writing in an editor, and good luck getting Prettier to format it correctly.
Next up was Notion. Why? Because I love Notion; it's one of my favorite tools for just about everything—albeit, I don't use it as much as I pretend to. If you're looking to use Notion as a CMS for statically-generated content however, you'll undoubtably run into a small snag:
images have an expiry time of 1 hour.
This API behavior is fine, if you're using Notion for dynamic content and can deal with overly-long API calls—but I'm not—and this isn't going to do it for my rudimentary blog site, sorry.
Next on my search were the usual suspects: enterprise-level CMS's that I'm not going to name. Absolute overkill for a simple blog. Once again, sorry.
The journey ends
Recently, we reworked the Outerbase blog and moved everything into Hashnode; a pleasant CMS that specializes in blog content.
At this stage in the process of selection, I thought "why not?" and gave it a shot. Wow, was I impressed. One simple graphQL-style call later and we're here 🎉
Designing the journey
Airbnb's been up to some fun stuff lately and it 100% inspired my blog redesign.
Something something 'great artists steal', whatever.
Some nifty little additions include:
Randomization to tile rotation when the page loads—go ahead and refresh that page a few times
Displaying relevant info (title, description, date) underneath each tile on desktop
A nice little "active" beacon that lets you know which blog info is currently showing
The sequel
I'm not entirely sure what I want to write about? I just know I want to / plan to do more of it. If you're reading this and thinking "hey Logan, I'd love to hear about insert topic here" shoot me a DM on Twitter / X, I'd love to hear what other folks are interested in.
Until next time 👋