I have a personal website.

A hub for me accumulate and showcase projects and thoughts. And a platform for me to experiment and learn new technologies.

I wrote an earlier blog post on why I chose to build instead of DnD.

In this post I want to go a bit more in depth on the stack and why of it. I’ll be updating this post as I update and expand on my stack.

SvelteKit

Basically my website is a very simple SvelteKit website.

It prerenders most pages upon build, making it light and easy.

I add a couple add-ins:

• TailwindCSS: allowing me to rapidly style elements
• Svelte-Seo: making SEO a little bit easier across pages (though SvelteKit makes that easy already)
• TypeScript: because of course
• [MDsveX]: because Markdown writing is just a lot more user-friendly than creating HTML documents by hand

Notion

One weird thing I have is Notion, which I use as a makeshift CMS for the ‘superfeed’ elements. The pinterest like board on the homepage for example. A full article on that, but here it is in a nutshell.

I have a table in Notion where I can quickly add notes, websites, tweets, and anything else to.

SvelteKit serverside, upon build, queries this database, parses the result, and renders it into HTML.

Every hour I execute a little script that checks any new updates, and re-builds the website if necessary. This makes it so that most of the content can be pre-rendered as static content. Meaning; I won’t have to make a Notion API call every time a user lands on a page (making it slow).

Why Notion and why not hard code? Because Notion, for now, is just a simpler system for me to collect the random things I come across every day. And since it renders to HTML, the final format for me is still valuable and shareable, even if Notion becomes obsolete.

Deployment

I’m lazy and opted for static hosting on Vercel.

My domain is registered via Vimexx.eu, a nice simple and cheap domain company where domains purchased are anonymous by default.

Codebase is of course hosted on Github. Every time I push/merge with main that triggers a build on Vercel. Near instant deployment.

The little CDN stuff I might need if I were to grow I’ve already setup via Cloudflare.

Very basic setup, but works like a charm and gives me a 100/100 score on PageSpeed.

Improvements I’m planning

Images I currently have in the static folder, I really should move those elsewhere.

Notion is nice to get started quickly, but has become a bit of a monster in day-to-day use. The serverside code to fetch data from NotionAPI is very very simple, but I might me building a custom implementation of how I use Notion a bit later (as an exercise).

Lots of improvements needed to prevent weird scrolling behaviour and loading (of images).

I want to experiment with stuff like Locomotive Scroll and other scroll effects. But that needs to be done elegantly. Also makes the site a bit less performant.

Might add ability for my clients to log in and download tools and presentations only available for them.