🚢: This site now runs on the Notion API.

Building a Blog on the Notion API

Update: it’s live. This page you’re seeing is now rendered through this latest version of my website.

I’m going to try re-implementing this site using the 

 as a backend. I’ve had a couple of blog posts saved as drafts in various places, and I’d like to reduce the friction to posting new things here. 

Remaining To Do list

 The blinking cursor is always there; I think then name of the game is to just get there faster.

The site is currently a Rails application. I love Rails but I also think it’s time to try something new here; particularly, I’d like to edit posts using Notion and not have to deploy or log into my admin site to add a new post.

ideally we can use ISR or push so that I don’t have to redeploy whenever something changes.

Should look and feel similar. SEO/etc should not be compromised at all.

Would be nice to draw on my iPad and be able to make the posts show up and update right away.

use notion’s types as much as possible so that we get static checking - this will make the renderer much easier to implement/iterate on.

 I’d have to check the Postgres database this site runs on, but ideally it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to migrate all the data over. 

I’d like to at least keep feature parity with what’s live right now. That includes:

Replace html renderer with JSX-based renderer

Notification blocks for unpublished posts

Ok I went for JSX instead of straight to html and that simplified things a lot. Feels like it’s halfway there now, but I need to get back to my day job for now.

One of the biggest unlocks is rendering notion blocks → jsx → html, instead of directly from notion → html.

Another nice realization is that we don’t have to implement the entire HTML spec. Only the types outlined in the Notion API client.

First version of Notion block → html renderer 

It seems like this is mostly straightforward, but I do wonder how easy rendering HTML is going to be. Notion has the concept of a Block, which is sort of like an HTML node.

I still think there are some open questions around how to properly render from Notion blocks → HTML. Might end up having to write a simple renderer here.