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Updated Nodebook landing pages

August 1, 2020 11:55pm

I've updated Nodebook landing page(s). Some of those changes were really due. I felt pretty bad when I saw comments on Product Hunt and realized that I probably drove off more people than I managed to convert. There were also some insanely bad choices in regards to remote deployment and general setup of things, and that part was always painful enough that I didn't want to work with them. But today I decided to "break the curse".

A lot of things have changed since the time I wrote that code, and looking at my own code, sometimes written even less than a year ago, still induced a lot of facepalming. I am super proud of the speed of iteration and delivery of my vision nowadays. As a results, the overhaul of landing page took around 8 hours or so. I've redone the landing page, put a live demo (embedded nodebooks) into the page which I tought was so cool that I couldn't believe I haven't done it sooner, redid payments/donation page and added a few quality-of-life improvement here and there (new icon, new background, new page titles, support for non-editable embedding, removing a bunch of dead code and non-breaking errors).

Nicest quality of life improvement for me as a coder of Nodebook was trying out to build front-end locally and just deploy it remotely. I basically do:

  • npm run build - build React project locally
  • tar -czvf build.gzip build/ - package it
  • scp build.gzip username@nodebook.io:/path/to/my/project - send it over SSH to remote server
  • tar -xzvf build.gzip - unpack the archive remotely

Building locally is much, much faster than remotely, and means simply delivering static assets, which is very simple and straightforward.

Overall, a pretty fun day, a lot has been achieved, I am happy with the results and surprised how little time it took, but I guess that's what tech experience buys - ability to facepalm yourself over your own code. :grin: