code, side projects
The updated blog site redesign is officially out! Well, its been up around a month or so, but I haven’t announced it here. I was having quite an ongoing issue trying to figure out how to get images loading properly on the home page sourced from each specific post. I was about to scrap it and use another template to tweak, but kept circling back cause I knew it was doable somehow! Glad I did and feeling pretty proud how it has turned out so far.
The other piece I have wanted for a while was keeping posts in specific year folders for both blog posts and images. I don’t know how many times I had moved the images folder testing to make sure they appear properly! At one point I added TinaCMS, which is a useful editor, but kept messing with my local set up. Maybe it’ll be added down the line too.
Now that the initial redesign is out, I was itching to get back into side projects. The first being Cafe Quest as I had one main next step to resolve. The locations list was previously hosted in a Supabase database and I wanted to move it to a different service. Supabase been a great tool to work with, but I kept getting the dreaded “this project will pause due to inactivity” messages. For their free tier, there needs to be some sort of activity in the database within a week to keep it “live” on the web. Otherwise, you have to log in and unpause it each time. I haven’t updated the database that often enough, and would get a lot of emails for this pause warning 😅.
I had a few stipulations for my next move and would steer my investigation:
My first options list included Neon, Prisma, Appwrite, and Firebase. I know not all are PostgreSQL based, but if some of the other requirements outweighed the rest, they could still viable options.
If no other options passed, I have some familiarity with Firebase using it in my CS50 Python final a few years ago, and a previous React project.
Neon seemed limited what it could work with a might’ve needed some middleware to connect? I didn’t investigate that one too deeply is why that’s a question.
For Prisma, I created an account, and it seemed promising to follow but their documentation and steps to set up didn’t seem to match what was available in the dashboard? So, more research is needed there too.
Appwrite was a front runner option for a while as it had a free tier and no pausing despite being a NoSQL database…until I received an email recently, they were going to start the week pause for the free tier too. So, that off the table.
At this point, I didn’t want to keep creating accounts to scope and test out each program, so I gave my requirements to Claude to see what it would say. It gave me a fifth option I had no idea about, and I’ll be hearing a collective developer groan… you can connect Google Sheets to React! I’ve heard some jokes for teams using CSV’s as databases, but as a singular file in table format, this fits pretty well.
Claude generated a helper file to parse the shared Google sheet into my project, removed an unused component, and it’s back to functional! There’s still some locations to add, styling fixes, and some future enhancements, but it’s much easier to add locations now, and a free integration.
Continuing on my side project updates list, I think I’ll start next updating my Average Reads application. I’d like to connect a search to a Books API, but there are only a couple of options out there right now that need further investigation. I’ll probably switch from Flask to test out FastAPI to keep it within the Python web app wheelhouse.