date: 'Friday, August 9 2024' title: 'Airtable and breadcumbs and ants'

description: 'Scalability via Airtable and Ant Design. Not doing literally everything from scratch myself.'

Airtable and breadcumbs and ants

Written by Brenda Zhang

Highlights:

• I was using a 1000 line JSON file for tools. That was getting out of hand quickly. I'm using Airtable now because I discovered that the free tier should be enough for quite a while and the next tier up is only $20/month. Hooked my base up to the API, replaced a dozen lines and and there, and it was done. Now I kind of have a CMS. It's easier to manage and more scalable than a JSON file anyway.

More stuff I did:

• Made some nice breadcrumbs real quick. There was no way to navigate back to a core page from a deeper page (e.g. from a blog post back to the blog or from a tool page back to the directory). That was bad UX and bad SEO. See them at the top of this post? Slick, huh?

• Meta titles (tab titles) of blog post pages blog post title now. I did this in a kind of hacky way because I haven't found a good package for reading frontmatter yet, but good enough for now.

Minor things you wouldn't care much about but I do:

• Squashed a bunch of bugs and made a bunch of tweaks. Small things like fixing the ref param on links, making external links open in new tabs, making internal links not open in new tabs, fixing margins and spacing here and there.

By the way:

I used the Ant Design component library for the breadcrumbs (and for quite a few other elements on the website now) so it was super quick. It blends in with anything and makes creating new features way faster, which means doing the website with code is more scalable for me, as one singular person.

Using existing component libraries and not doing literally everything from scratch is something I learned I had to not be stubborn about over the course of many projects. Priorities, priorities.

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