Devlog: what is a cms?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on this portfolio site here. I’ve been hard at work integrating some fun CMS stuff that my girlfriend Vina told me about!

I had no idea what a CMS was until last week! It’s a way to create and manage content without needing to code, according to Optimizely.

Look, I’m lazy and a visual learner. I could stare at each of the blog post’s .mdx files and type everything out manually, but I could also just use a CMS to help me write my blog posts faster.

Now, I don’t want it to be too easy, because where’s the fun in that? I decided on a more lightweight solution through what’s known as a headless CMS, where the content management is separate from the frontend (so I can basically customize it).

I’m using TinaCMS, which I picked over Sanity because it’s open-source, lightweight, integrated directly with Git, and has real-time editing capabilities. I can edit directly through my site and choose to integrate a lot of stuff myself, for example, I’ve connected my image hosting to my own Cloudinary account.

Just having a text editor makes life a lot easier…

Yeah, right now trying to upload images through Tina’s Cloudinary plugin simply doesn’t work and I’m pretty sure I’ve followed their starter repo pretty well. Not a huge deal right now, as I can upload manually to Cloudinary anyway, and I’m going to start working on a website rework tomorrow anyway.

Signing off!