Project journal entry site v1

A bare-bones site for recording progress made towards a project in a journal-entry style. The idea is to show the behind-the-scenes progress with an update after each learning session, instead of a polished blog post once the project is finished.

Aug 28, 2024

I just finished writing this whole entry, then the page refreshed and I lost all the work. Grumble grumble.

It's 7am, and I've spent the last couple of hours putting together this Webflow site. My aim for this site is to be a journal entry-style blog where I can share behind-the-scenes progress made towards a project.

Besides this, I have a newsletter which I use as a blog, where after I have finished building an AI project, I write a long and in-depth deep dive about how it was built, skipping over the pitfalls and failures.

Then, I use LinkedIn as a micro journal where I share the messy behind-the-scenes progress. But, I'm not able to see all of the entries related to a specific project very easily.

I thought about building this site from scratch, but three previous websites I've built from scratch all live in a graveyard now, and I don't want to spend a few weeks building a worse version of what Webflow offers. I'm a little worried about Webflow going under and losing all my stuff, so will need to figure out how backups work.

Progress made today

I have created two CMS collections, one for journal entries (what you're reading now), and one for projects. I can associate a journal entry with a project, but they don't have to be associated with a project. This supports my love of curiosity trails, where I dedicate time to go down rabbit holes of curiosity with no particular aim in mind.

The skittle sorting robot project has several entries where I copied and pasted my LinkedIn posts about them. This journal entry over blog post concept feels very freeing. There is zero perfectionism. Yayy!

After the CMS items, I created a two simple pages: Home and Projects. I also styled the two build-in template pages for both collections: A project, A journal entry.

I learned how to create a reusable navigation bar that I can paste across multiple pages, where a change made to one is reflected across all of them.

I used Relume to grab a couple free navigation and blog components just to render them on the page. Here's what the site looks like after doing that:

Ideas

  • Create a page dedicated to journal entries. Because they are more important than the projects themselves.
  • Implement my Notion Swipe File databases in Webflow. For example, I have a database filled with awesome AI use-cases I've come across in the wild. It'll be good to be able to share them.
  • Create an ideas scratch pad page for each project, which shows up as like a sidebar with bullet point ideas exactly like this section I'm writing here, so they're not lost in journal entries.
  • Maybe a resource section of things that have been used in projects, like Webflow, Relume, Vimeo etc etc.

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What's next?

I'm most drawn to re-reading Refactoring UI, so that I can create my own styleguide based on UI/UX principles as a first step to making all of the content look really good. At the moment, the font is dull and the text colour is too blocky, the background is glaring, the spacing is all wrong, there is zero personality.

Once the style foundations are in place, I can think about the design of the individual pages. I want the journal entries to look like journal entries.

This is funn!