In the past few years, several services sprung up to combat a simple problem: that Instagram only allows a single link per profile. These services mainly provide a means to allow multiple links to be added to a profile, and yet, they always felt like a hack. Our digital lives are spread across many different services, and services such as Linktree exist because what we really lack is a personal home page.
As part of my final portfolio project at Codaisseur, I decided to build a personal homepage builder. While there are more than enough website builders, they are all either far too complex and focused entirely on structure, or, they're part of social networks that aim to tie the user to their platform. When I considered the real use case of a personal website for most people, it can really be narrowed down to a few things: a profile picture, biography, links to other services, and some lists (favourite books, films, etc.). I figured that people that are really into books, films, and so on probably use a dedicated service for that such as GoodReads. Instead of replicating that service, each section has an option of attaching a link to said service.
The design was kept as simple as possible, however, the person can choose their colour scheme as a means to personalize it. But at the end of the day, it is the content itself that will make each page unique.
On a technical side, I built the API in Node.js, using Mongoose to interact with MongoDB, and cookies combined with JWTtokens for authentication. For the front-end, I used React, storing the data in Redux, together with React-Hook-forms, and Sass.
