Alex Tenczar

To Anyone Reading this…

Being the site’s first blog post, I thought I would just briefly write about my plans for the blog and how this site was made.

Plans For The Blog

Honestly, I don’t have many plans for this blog other than documenting something I feel hasn’t been talked about already by someone else. This may be related to development, or might be some other thought I believe may be of interest to anyone else. I’m not someone that likes preaching to other people (especially online).

Making This Site

I’ve put off my next iteration of a portfolio site for a bit, but I always had a thought of what it might look like. Something simple to display my professional work as well as my photos. I’m not looking to reinvent the wheel, just display one I’ve made.

The technologies used for the site are as follows:

Front End

Next.js - Not much to explain here, I’ve come to use Next.js for the past few years and like its features.
Tailwind CSS - Helped me get this site styled quicker.
Google’s Material Icons - A collection of great open source icons.
Leaflet - Renders any maps I want to display on the site.
SASS - I’m used to using SASS in my work, and I don’t want to completely rely on Tailwind.
Luxon - Prevents any headaches to do with timezones or converting dates.
Lenis - For that smooth scrolling.

APIs

Flickr’s API - Flickr’s API gives me more options than just fetching images. No need for additional libraries to read Metadata. It’s already queryable.
Notion’s API - Notion’s API is powerful enough to allow spinning up a simple blog or personal website with custom fields. After using it for this site, I could find myself using it again.
Open Weather’s API - I use this for displaying the current weather of my location.
Map Tiler’s API - After comparing several map tile providers, Map Tiler stuck out as the best if I wanted to customize the theme and language of the map. I’d love to use OpenStreetMap, but their options are too few.

Back End

Next.js - Next.js uses SSR, SSG, and has server features like Middleware routing, so I’m going to stick this in here.
Next-Intl - For i18n, I’m using Next-Intl. It offers a pretty straightforward method of translating page elements.
Notion’s Database - I have two Notion Databases set up for Projects and the Blog. This allows me to easily update my posts without any code changes.
NodeMailer - For Sending Contact Messages To My Email.
Flickr - I currently host my photos on Flickr, their API has a lot of useful endpoints and their free-tier storage is more than enough. I’ve thought of hosting them on something like AWS S3, but that would add another level of complexity I don’t want to account for yet.
Vercel - I’m hosting this site on Vercel. There’s no need to complicate hosting if it’s not a commercial or high-traffic website.

You can view the repo here: https://github.com/alextenczar/alextenczar.com-Three

If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message. Enjoy your day ✌️