Hello 1997!
Put on your cargo pants and aviators because we’re reviving (the spirit of) Geocities!
Blogalog started a a personal portfolio project. Then as a hackathon project. Then other people wanted to put their sites on it.
The “why” is pretty easy: I’m lazy. I wanted a blog without having to deal with CMS or Markdown or Github Actions to re-deploy a site whenever I updated some text. I wanted something as simple as Notion.
But as any dev who’s ever built their own blog system — building the UI is a chore. Lots of forms, lots of CRUD. No good. I just wanted it to work, so I chose Notion to do the heavy lifting for me.
Updating this site is easy — I just write in Notion like normal. And then it just shows up on the site, ~20 seconds later!
There’s a couple of tricks under the hood to prevent crazy stuff from happening — there’s a (somewhat reverse-engineered) Cloudflare worker for retrieving Notion data, a Cloudflare KV layer for caching requests with flexible TTL and “TTR” (time to reload), etc. This all gives a flexible system that prevents me from having to “save and republish” content, all the while being able to review the new content (~20 second later 😛 because that’s the “TTR” window I set).
What are the cons of such a setup? Notion might yoink, yeet, or update the API and then it’s gone. Super.so and other similar sites are in that boat, too.
Not everyone likes/wants to use Notion. Too bad, you kind of have to. It’s probably trivial to swap out Notion Google Sheets or Airtable as an alternate backend at some point.
How do you make money?!
I don’t, this doesn’t; it costs nothing, and is a place for me (and friends and projects) to put up their sites
How does this differentiate from Linktree?!
Linktree is just… links. This is more than that. This even supports Email signup (with Fillout.com) and Login-gating and other neat features Linktree doesn’t have. Maybe I’ll do Stripe payment integration one day. Maybe even crypto one day (kidding).
Why is it so Ugly?!
Why doesn’t it look like any other site that uses Tailwind and Inter and Shadcn and create-react-template? Well actually I do use Tailwind and Inter, and have the ability to. I just… wanted it to feel like something closer to the 90’s, or pre-news-feed Facebook, or Myspace back in the day. We’ll have templates and CSS up and running soon so your site can look like any other site.
How do I sign up?!
That part isn’t actually built yet. But if you’re really keen, just email me (jan@phage.directory) and I’ll get you setup.