Hey, thanks for poking around my repo! I wrote about myself and my digital garden on petemillspaugh.com/about, so I'll use this space to touch on the technical bits.
React and Next are the frontend framework and meta framework I know best. I really enjoy working with both. I plan to move from the legacy /pages directory to /app.
I'm using MDX with next-mdx-remote for written content.
Components are a spectrum from low-level building blocks like Blockquote to highly composed components like Garden. It's hard to draw a line in the sand between component-library-components that might live in /components/lib and bespoke components that are reused just once or not at all. So I mixed them all in one /components folder. Credit to Josh Comeau's wonderful React course for this structure.
I rely on unstyled component libraries like Radix UI for my underlying component primitives when it comes to complex implementations like Popover and Switch. I love getting accessibilty and usability out of the box with these sorts of libraries.
I like the flexibility of CSS-in-JS and the colocation of markup + styles with styled-components. I also prefer writing vanilla CSS to writing utility classes, e.g. with Tailwind. I'm considering moving away from CSS-in-JS, though, maybe to CSS modules.
I use Code Hike to drop code examples in my MDX. It's fantastic.
I use react-spring for the Edison bulb in the top right corner of my garden, which I wrote about here. I'd like to play more with Framer Motion like I did in weeksofyour.life (loading UI).
This is a static site, but there is some stuff that happens server-side. Email newsletter signup/verification/distribution is one. I used val.town to write custom email subscription logic, which I wrote about here. Signup is in the footer, in case you're interested!
Cloudflare is my domain registrar of choice. They don't mark up domains and come with the expected features (SSL, etc.).
I deploy on Vercel. Automatic preview deployments on PRs are really handy for a static site like this.
I use Vercel Analytics to track # of visitors, page visits by URL, referrers, countries, operating systems, and browsers. These are just curiosity/vanity metrics for me—I'm not interested in collecting or doing anything with individual user data. I might migrate from Vercel to Plausible or another alternative at some point.
No plans to ever monetize. My garden is for fun, learning, and meeting friends on the Internet!