I need to familiarise myself with Next + Supabase, so used this (generally) very engaging official tutorial to get me started. However, I quickly ran into a problem. The “Log in” page has two buttons: “Sign In” and “Sign Up”. Because the “Sign in” button is green, I clicked on it without much thought. But, with no signed up, no one can sign in. A sensible error message, “Could not authenticate user”, appears.

I had a coffee with a Frontend developer on Monday, and he was telling me how he finds playing with Angular helped him understand React better. Another framework he mentioned is Svelte. It is something I always wanted to try out, so I decide to give the official quick start tutorial a spin. I started from the beginning and stopped at around the “bindings” part. It is a very easy framework to get the hang of!

I had planned to follow these steps one after another to create a simple CRUD website with Express and MongoDB Atlas: run a “hello world” example on my local machine. deploying it to a common platform, e.g. Vercel. wiring up the deployed Express App to the Mongo Atlas database Steps 1 and 2 were fine. This official guide was helpful, even though I still don’t understand exactly why I need to remove the following line before deploying:-

The relevant code can be found in this repo. After attending a meet-up, I was told of a volunteering opportunity to improve the group website. Specifically, at present, there was no functionality for the website to send out a confirmation email after someone signs up. The tech lead who put the website together in a few hours says that a good tool for this feature would be Mailgun. So I decided to give Mailgun a quick spin, to see if I am up for the task.

I discovered quite by chance yesterday that not all Hugo websites are crawled by Google. As Henry Leach explains when he was trying to search an old blog post in 2021 And that’s how I found out that I hadn’t configured a robots.txt file for my updated Hugo site, and Google was politely ignoring it. It seems the same is true of 2024 as well. Maybe that is one reason search engines such as DuckDuckGo or Marginalia is better for searching blog posts.