wmby.me

The website revamp started with two objectives. Modernise the design, and build a better system for managing my content and my thoughts.

My previous website was fun but it didn't really have much content. That is mostly because it was a pain to update. I have been writing more and I wanted an easy way to publish that writing without it being a chore. I could just publish articles straight out of Notion, but then I couldn't control the styles and my website would look like another Notion page. So I decided to design my own site and use Notion as the CMS behind it.

There are existing tools which do this. The most popular one is called Super. But I didn't want to use anything existing, I just wanted to create my own version from scratch.

Integrating the Notion API into the Next.js project was pretty straightforward. The majority of the work was setting up the databases in Notion and getting the formatting to render properly in the app.

The thing I did not expect is how much the database design ends up shaping what I write. The site reads whatever I put in Notion, so if a database is badly organised the site is badly organised, and I feel it every time I sit down to publish something.