My Notebook
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Notebook v2.0

2020-05-03 · 2 min readMy new and improved notebook!Last year around September, I decided to stoop down, and code a notebook. Basically what a notebook is, is a way for people to write down their thoughts, or anything cool, and make it public so they are help accountable for writing in it so often. The main barrier for me has been that it has been a pain to write in. From the start, I used individual pages, where I needed to write JSX pages, commit them, and watch them build, then I realized markdown was easier, so I started to write in MDX. After a few months of that, I decided that the actual committing part was a pain, and I started to look for a CMS, and decided on Airtable. Airtable is a great database for small projects, but the small writing space and speed became a problem.With all of that out of the way, I attempt to solve all of my problems with this new improved..... Notebook v2.0! Basically what I changed here, is instead of sloppy Next.js code (trust me, you can take a look at the commit history), I improved it with Next.js, Theme-UI, and Rebass, for a nice clean UI and a minimalist theme. Then from there, I ventured (not far) for a new CMS. What I was looking for was anything where I could :
  1. Write comfortably in
  2. Host image files for me
  3. Easily access anywhere
And that's when I found Prismic! It's amazin, because its free for one person (haha where being alone is helpful), has a great user interface, and has a content system which links to an easy to use database. This was perfect for what I was looking for, and decided to not only make a switch in CMS, but change the design a ton. With the ability to add tags now, I decided to add a tagging system, where I can have tags related to releases and for other types of things (design heavily influenced by Lachlan's and Mingjie's Notebook styles), so its easily searchable so you can find similar content. Lastly, I wanted a way to see how many people actually read it (most likely 0), but didn't want to track IPs or have a view count, so I decided on a star system! Basically, anyone can star a post, and it'll increment the counter. It's hosted on goJSON one of my new Go projects which I'll probably write a post about sometime. You can try starring it at the top or bottom, and it helps me know you liked it, or if anyone reads them (it mostly doesn't matter because this is to improve my writing skills)!
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