Michael Leon

You can be the most intellectual person on the planet but if you have a child-like mindset, that is, being very emotional and prioritizing it over your logical reasons & expressing them through your actions, then people aren't going to respect you for the type of person you are.

I'm solving the frustrations I had with Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress while trying to make my own product as technically friendly as possible. But there's still technical stuff you have to do. The only difference is that I did most of the work for you.

So I decided to build my own website from scratch using NextJS and Convex for the first time I needed to solve my own problem while creating a boilerplate out of it. And if I have the same problem, there are others who encounter the same issues that I have.

#BuildInPublic Day 70-76 (technically Day 79 now) on creating a portfolio-CMS boilerplate based on my personal NextJS website I'm currently trying to finish building. Login to my admin dashboard is finally working again.

A clean install of Windows 10 didn’t even fix it also. I figured it was time for a new (used) gaming laptop so I could run better LLMs locally. During the downtime, I backed up all my files twice and recovered everything, including most of my sessions and project progress.

But wait, what happened to Days 33-51 with the radio silence? Microsoft released the Windows 10 April update that completely corrupted my laptop by being stuck frozen in the middle of an update. I couldn’t even boot up into Safe Mode. That got corrupted also.

Day 52-69 #BuildInPublic NextJS website → Portfolio Boilerplate I’m back to shipping again after a few weeks of a lack of updates. • Added & polished new admin sections: Appearance, Authors, and Settings pages • Future-proofed the admin layout

You can check out my 404 page at: mhlstudios.com/404 The 404 page for the creator-CMS boilerplate will be generic and not be like mines unfortunately.

Day 26 #BuildInPublic Wix → NextJS✅ Day 31: Create a Creator-CMS boilerplate based on my website Customized my 404 page since I didn't want it to be generic. I would add 3D animation if I knew how to use Blender but I don't. Maybe later in the future Technically Day 33 now

But at least the before and after from Wix to NextJS looks good. Fixed most of the issues with my website. It's ready via mhlstudios.com

Day 30: Now the final polish. Adding PostHog analytics, an admin dashboard, and reconfiguring Resend for my contact forms. Lesson learned: Don’t procrastinate on domain migrations. I spent $18 on a separate expiring domain + another $20 on Porkbun migration

Day 22-30 #BuildInPublic Wix → NextJS update 48 hours before my Wix subscription renewed, I was nowhere near ready. NextJS site was full of bugs after pushing from localhost to Vercel. Every localhost reference had to be reconfigured for a live website. The stress was intense

Day 15-21 #BuildInPublic Wix → NextJS update Spent the whole week deep in the admin section • Polished the Blog Posts & Newsletter pages • Built the Pages for SEO • Built the Files page • Built a Custom Code page • Built the Contacts page Now in testing phase #WebDev