TL, DR; I've updated my website!

Hello There! Welcome to my site.🎉

In June 2021, I revamped my portfolio website, as I wanted to create a space to showcase my designs, side projects and write regularly.

After experimenting with many website builders and no-code platforms, I decided to build a site from scratch by learning to code. I created a largely static website using Next.js and integrated Ghost CMS as a backend for the writing blog.

A snapshot of my old site 👇

I hosted Ghost CMS on the Heroku platform, and the entire website on Vercel. After few initial hiccups, I successfully launched the site on June 7, 2021.

I was not comfortable with fetching data using React. Although my site was functional, I realised that it had some fundamental issues and did not meet the coding standards.

• I used the "dangerouslysetInnerHTML" method for fetching dynamic data from the CMS. It is not a good practice and makes the site vulnerable to scripting attacks. You can read more about this here.
• The website was not accessibility compliant.
• There were some DB configuration issues on Heroku - Whenever I added images to the blog, the content broke.
• The information flow on the site felt unstructured.

I decided to rebuild the site to fix some of the issues mentioned above. I incorporated Graph QL that made data querying and fetching relatively easy and secure.

I also came across a self-hosted CMS built on Native GraphQL - Graph CMS to act as the backend for my site.

The free plan is more than generous for my needs. The RTE is not as rich as Ghost CMS but, it was a compromise I was willing to pay for the convenience. Since the CMS was self-hosted, it made my site maintenance easy.

After multiple late-night coding and numerous trial and error sessions, I successfully deployed my new website was launched on Sep 6, 2021.

Presently, the site is still a work in progress, but I've addressed most of the issues discussed above. I still plan to:

• Increase the accessibility compliance. (Very basic as of now 🙈)
• Add table of contents to the case studies
• Add pagination and search for the blog
• Create a CTA to toggle between light and dark modes.

Anyways, for the second time in a year, I have updated my personal website and hope you all like it!

Thanks for reading. Have a relaxing day! 😀