Monorepo for my personal site's source code and convenience/CMS scripts.

The previous iteration of this site was a Gatsby project deployed using Netlify. I wrote posts using Google Docs and used a bespoke folder structure to indicate what should be published, what was in progress, etc. Google didn't offer convenient export options so I had to manually copy doc content into Gatsby Markdown folders, which was annoying.

My primary requirement this time around was to have an excellent writing and cataloging UX. I really like writing with Notion, and Notion databases offer the post catalog functionality I want. The scripts/ directory contains a pipeline that uses the official Notion client to fetch database record metadata, string manipulation to convert some of that metadata into frontmatter, and notion-to-md to convert the record bodies into Markdown, which is then written to src/content as a series of .mdx files. This pipeline can be executed from the top-level directory with make notion.

The website itself uses Next.js, React and TypeScript, and is deployed using Vercel. It uses next-mdx-remote and mdx-js to convert static .mdx files into JSX. The site uses static site generation for speediness. The other goal of using .mdx files is so I can insert visualization or interactivity into an individual post without needing to create a custom page.

I could have built a more reactive application that would keep the site at content parity with my Notion database, but that felt too over-engineered for the frequency at which I write/update content, so instead I use make notion, npm run dev, tsc and git push origin head which triggers a production build and deployment in Vercel.

I use Tailwind to theme raw converted JSX, and for its higher-level layout primitives. My fonts are hosted by Adobe.

• Better monorepo package/tsconfig structure. Turborepo?

todo layout stuff

• switch to Next 13 concepts like global layout
• 12 column layout? I want 2/3 1/3. It works because some layouts will have 1 column of padding on each side, with a inner gutter, leaving a 6-column and 3-column spread

todo general

• consider using CSS spline handles (see phone for note) to write custom async animations

Copyright 2023 Duncan McIsaac