Itās spring out there and the best time for gardening šØāš¾
The whole idea of having a digital garden for me is not only to write notes and articles on it but to constantly make small improvements over time to find the best suitable technology and user experience. It is supposed to be a joy to come and write not a pain in the ass.
I received a couple of emails asking what technologies I used for my garden, and where I host it. This got me thinking, do I have found the right technology? Not that I worry about whether it is suitable for others, but is it for me?
Iāve been going back and forth with new technologies for my digital garden to find perfect solutions. Last time I used Gatsby to generate static websites, mdx files to write articles, and hosted on GitHub pages. It was fast and worked great, writing articles in pure markdown, but having a possibility to extend its functionality by using custom react.js components was great, but it lacked user experience of writing. Every time I wanted to write a new article, I had to open VS Code, and after finishing the article I had to trigger a build, either by running a command on my local machine or GitHub action. Iām not a fan of content management systems and handling all the caveats of them but still lacked the UI to handle articles.
Recently, I discovered a great tool PageCMS which is as they call it friendly CMS running straight on top of Git Hub. You connect GitHub repository and manage your markdown and media files of your repository through their nice and clean user interface. You have markdowns and image files living in your repository and do the heck you want with them.
I could use PageCMS with my existing Gatsby application but I heard great about Next.js 14 and its new App Router, but having Next.js hosted on Vercel is seamless CI/CD.
Now, my digital garden is based on Next.js, hosted on Vercel, and using PageCMS to edit my markdown articles. This is what the current flow looks like: I go to PageCMS to create a new article, and when I save, it pushes the commit to the repository and Vercel automatically deploys, how dope is it?
