Building this website

How/Why/What next?

January 27, 2023

Motivation

Needed a place to publish stuff on the web, owned by me, and also something that I like.

Some background

I have been web-native since 2004. Started my first blog in maybe 2008, but I did join Orkut (the major social network at the time in India), and then Facebook. Never really stuck to blogging, as I jumped platforms - from a blogspot, to wordpress, to Ghost, and now finally building one from scratch using NextJS

The risk

I am very prone to over-engineering, and that was almost going to happen to this blog. But now I have decided to take an incremental approach to this. I have started with a tiny landing page, a minimal "notes" section, and that's about it

What next

There are lots of things I want to do with this site, some are also tracked in a private repo's github issues. Maybe I'll make it public at some point. But here's a random list:

  1. Better landing page - better content and navigation
  2. Better explaniation of notes vs blog posts
  3. Better search/filter/tagging
  4. RSS feeds
  5. SEO/images per blog post/notes
  6. A 2-way linking method using slugs + metadata that tracks a page's local inbound/outbound links
  7. Webmentions
  8. Better editing experience
  9. Link to Roam/some other data source
  10. A 'books' page with Goodreads data pulled in
  11. ... and more!