Just updated my website for the first time in a longgggg time (4 years to be exact!)

Its great how much SEO I've built up on the old one, but I think its long overdue for a fresh coat of paint (and description), so here it goes...

My motto while building this was "make it simple, but surprisingly complex... WIDGETSSS"

I updated basically everything but here are the features I'm most proud about:

- A spotify widget to the bottom left (exposing all my songs)

- A location widget that receives a city & weather update every 4am from my phone

- A notebook widget to check up on my posts (had to add an rss feed for this)

- Lastly a github widget to see my last commit

- I had to finagle a good way to get static & dynamic widgets working because fetching my large RSS feed was taking too long (I eventually settled on fixing it on my notebook side, but I hope Next13 will be compatible with emotion ui soon...)

I'd like to add a couple more widgets in the future (maybe something that interacts with something in my room? DM or email me if you have any ideas) but I'll get to that after college apps

Getting to make something that wasn't super complex after being (very slightly) "burnt-out" due to college apps was super fun.

Updating my website for the first time in 4 years!

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 :

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)!

<p class="para">This is a quick article on this project! What I want this to be is a place to write down my thoughts fast and quick and to have a place to put them. Mostly its to encourage me to write more and improve writing skills, but also help with my art/web design skills which... need work. A checklist of things that I need to do for this website</p>
<ul>
<li>Make a decent UI ✅</li>
<li>Add image cards to front ✅</li>
<li>Add some content ✅</li>
<li>Make the cards move ✅</li>
<li>Make a light/dark mode ✅</li>
<li>Anything more? Email me at <a style={{textDecoration: "none",color:"#2970f2"}} href="mailto:neel.redkar@outlook.com">neel.redkar@outlook.com</a></li>
</ul>

#releases

MyWebsite 2.0

Notebook v2.0

Notebook

.css-4cffwv{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}#releases

MyWebsite 2.0

Notebook v2.0

Notebook

#releases