With the site nearing completion I still had two things that needed doing: Adding a links landing page and building a better blogging workflow

Links Landing Page

If you've ever seen something like Linktree or Blue Social, the idea isn't far off, a simple landing page that directs your visitors to connect with you on social media, email you, etc.

I had previously a built a version and hosted it on sunny.gg. However this time around I wanted something that was integrated into my bigger site. Doing this was pretty straightforward, my frontend code for sunny.gg was already written in React and used TailwindCSS so I was good to go there. The incompatibility came to which framework it used. While I built sunny.gg to use Gatsby, I built this site on top of NextJS. Beyond that I also used a different contact form backend, using Netlify Forms rather than SendGrid (which I use now on this site).

The first step would be to get data routed. For this I repeated React Context API pattern I was already using to fetch data for other parts of the site, I simply added another Context that would provide data to this landing page. This was a pretty straightforward task and from there I moved on to migrating my contact form to use SendGrid.

I had already written all the logic around sending a message to SendGrid via Netlify Functions; however, in it's current state the logic was bound to a component. I quickly refactored this logic, moving it from the component it was in to a hook that could be used by both components, you can see how I setup the hook here.

With the data and contact form being adapted to NextJS, I was able to copy the project wholesale from the old repository and drop it into my new site, easy peasy.

Blogging Workflow

One other annoyance I wanted ot solve for the site was the blogging workflow. Because I opted not to use a CMS, there was zero user friendliness around creating a blog post. Here I opted for a minimal setup using a few scripts:

createPost.js - The first script I created was to help me create new blog posts. My blog posts use FrontMatter for metadata so the script does 2 thing: One it creates the file in /posts, the second thing it does is automatically pre-fill the FrontMatter in the new post so I don't have to worry about missing a field. I also added several checks to make sure the blog post filename doesn't collide with any other post filenames.

deletePost.js - Just as the name implies, this script just deletes a given post. Apparently at some point I decided that simply deleting a post using rm -rf was too difficult.

listPosts.js - Again just as the name implies, give you a list of files in the /posts directory.

All three of these commands are linked in package.json under the commands: post:create, post:delete, and post:ls. With these commands I can more quickly create blog posts with less hassle, and ever increasing laziness.

You can find these scripts here

Looking Forward

That's it for now. The site is coming along nicely but there are still places to improve. One big issue is the image used in my landing page isn't optimized like it was in Gatsby. Gatsby has one of the best image optimization libraries and replicating that with NextJS has proved to be more challenging that I previously thought.