Pitch: Personal Website

January 02, 2020

This is a pitch for adding some features to my personal website.

The problem

I want to share more personal stuff online. Things I’m excited about the most right now:

A blog about building online products;
A ‘Now page’, where I share the things I’m working on right now;
An about page;
A list of all the projects I have going on;

I thought of writing about those things on stef.co, the site I’m using for my consultancy business, but I want to keep personal and business separated.

So I need a new blog. I already got a Gatsby base installed on stefthoen.com but I need some changes to support the 3 things mentioned above.

Appetite

This is a small batch project. I only want to give it one week. It’s somewhat of a prologue and to get a feel for the process.

Solution

This is the Gatsby Blog Starter I’m using right now. It’s a blog boilerplate with support for MDX, which is form of Markdown that lets you use JSX in your Markdown. Since I’m a developer writing about development, I think it’ll come in handy.

The homepage is an index page that shows a small summary of all the blog posts. Every summary links to the blog post in full.

I want:

A new homepage that has an introduction of me, a summary of the last blog post with a link to the post, and a list of featured projects I’m working on, with a name, a short description and a link to the project.

A ‘Now’ page that shows an unordered list of things I’m focussing on right now.
An about page, that is a simple template that holds text and a photo.
A way for people to start discussions about posts on Twitter. Best would probably be to have a link beneath each blog post that not only automatically creates a tweet, but also pre-fills it with my handle and perhaps the URL to the blog post, or the title as a hashtag. Needs research how other people do it.
A navigation that has links to home, blog, projects and now.
Tags for blog posts. I want to make collections of blog posts. I.e. all the pitches, all posts related to a project, etc.
A products index page based on the blog index page.
A single product page based on a blog single page.
Write a unique intro for pitches that automatically gets used in all pitches.

Rabit holes

The Twitter comment thing is really not that important. Just a new tweet with my handle automatically pre-filled would suffice.

No Gos

I’m not adding any styling for now and I’m keeping the look of the starter that I’ve used as a base. I don’t know how I want it to look and am not capable (yet) to create a design within such a short timespan.