EBDM.DEV / Blog

Hear about some of my mad ramblings.

Enjoy the loop, comment down below if you know how many times it goes 🙂

It has been a while folks, I have been both busy and idle; working and off adventuring and my general anhedonia got in the way of my own personal hacking but I am back! With a vengeance!

Last weekend I worked on reviving this Notion-backed blog, after trying to go another way (Contentful) and deciding I prefer this workflow. After loving Ali Abdal’s tertiary brain videos many moons ago, I too have been mapping my mind in Notion - now, if there’s a particular piece or journal entry I want to drop on my blog all it takes is a drag into the right subsection, and boom!

Technically it does require a manual SSG (Static Site Generation) rebuild but hold onto your hats people, I am going to take a look at ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) that NextJS, my framework of choice, gives you easy access to. I just need to find a way to trigger it from Notion.

Okay, enough of my pre-amble - what have I done?

Firstly I made the project public on GitHub this time so if you’re that way inclined you can go view my progress here

I might need to build a renderer for these GitHub previews now 😬

Secondly, I did a deep dive through my git history and pulled out all the Notion blog components and to my utter amazement, it only required a bit of refactoring after I got my head around 13 month younger Eric’s code that was aided by the terrifyingly wonderful GitHub CoPilot (a blog post entirely on that will be coming soon!)

Thirdly, instead of finding a way of integrating Notion’s commenting system into the webpage, I instead went with utterances a commenting system that integrates with GitHub issues so you’ll need to sign in there to leave any thoughts below. Please do 🙂

And now finally I’m tidying the whole thing up to fit with my previously remodelled ascetic (I’m not a designer so feel free to comment down below with suggestions)

My future plans for this blog beyond ISR include adding a mailing list to keep those who want to remain informed in the loop, SEO improvements, and adding more render types to the posts like this GitHub preview card. Oh, and it wouldn’t be a proper developer’s site without a dark theme so it’s gotta get one of them at some point too! I also hope to start churning out more content in the nearer term too now I’m all satisfied with this.