Goal

Make writing online as seamless as possible, as an inspiration to create more. This way I can focus on writing, and never on posting my writing. Source from Notion, including media inside posts, on a highly performant website with minimal JS.

Problems with old site

https://v2.mitchinson.dev - https://github.com/bmitchinson/v2.mitchinson.dev

• Have to upload media into cloudinary CDN, then link in markup.
• Have to git commit draft posts in order to work across devices.
• Configuring the theme was difficult. Vanilla JS inside an older blogging framework.

Fixes to those problems

• Notion is wonderful to write / brainstorm ideas in, and react-notion-x reflects the files / tweets / videos well in the web.
• All posts are pulled in from Notion, so no more committing drafts, or committing at all!
  • Here’s this post you’re reading, as the notion link I wrote it in.
  • All posts, as organized in notion
• Extending the blogging theme I forked from is much easier than the last.

Other new features

• https://mitchinson.dev, a concise home to show what I’m working on + share music / photos
  • Auto updated from notion again!
• mitchinson.dev functions as my own url shortener
  • links configured from notion
• Github Readme is also auto updated
  • https://github.com/bmitchinson

How notion rendering works

• CI/CD around my writing infra lives here: https://github.com/bmitchinson/bmitchinson
• My blog is statically rendered from pulling in all the notion posts. Takes 40 seconds to rebuild so, I rebuild the site entirely on an hourly check for post changes