Thoughts on sellmore.net.au

Been sinking a fair bit of time into migrating the sellmore.net.au setup lately. Even though my head's usually buried in C++ and flight control logic these days, keeping this site running as my design benchmark is handy. I've been shifting it over to Next.js and Tailwind CSS, and the new stack is working well, although v3 migrated to v4 mid deployment...

As this is my first major Next.js and React site, and a first for SSG (Static Site Generation) nailing the setup has been tricky. The real headache was dealing with the WebCentral woes. Trying to get the name servers updated through the WebCentral dashboard and synced up with the Embrace cPanel was a massive pain—it felt like wrestling with a system that just didn't want to talk to itself.

The design came from the original AI Site Builder so migrating over to the next elements using Next.js used templating to find a similar result. I had to change some elements to allow for the modern site generation. I utilised Gemini to create some front end designs that helped me migrate the original website from the AI Site Builder (clunky things they are) to a more robust static site created using React and Next.js modern components. The AI Site Builder was originally using React so the migration wasn't too difficult. However culling the 30,000 lines of flexbox code that was created by the website builder was not an easy task at all.

Once I've completely finished the build, they allowed for Node.js as a new feature where I've been working on refining the deployment for the SSG for a while. Now it's not even necessary lol. I've moved over to hCaptcha instead of reCAPTCHA from Google, which was implemented using the AI site builder. Sometimes I think moving over to react and node using next.js was a bad decision architecturally; however it does look a lot better than the AI website builder, I must say.

Highlights

• Wrangling the DNS settings and getting SSL locked down without too much drama.
• Setting up a slick Tailwind baseline that I'm already using to style up my other web design projects.
• hcaptcha vs reCAPTCHA

Closing Thoughts

Still a bit of hard yards left to get the web3forms and hCaptcha infrastructure completely dialled in, but it's taking shape nicely.

The hCaptcha approach, I have been strung into by the decision to use web3forms prior to implementing the Captcha will stick with me as an architecture design oops! for my future projects.

For now, working on monitoring and bugtesting post deployment!

yay solo dev!

Thanks for reading, have a good one!