Once upon a time, in the days before Twitter became a hateful cesspool, there would be little delightful things there. One of those was something that my wife Máiréad used to do every December, where she would sample different mince pies and give them a rating (out of 5 Christmas trees).
Now that Twitter is no place for respectable people, and because I’m a big nerd, I decided to build her a website to share her words of pastry-related wisdom with the world.
I built a version a few years ago, using React to fetch data from a Google Spreadsheet, and pull the images from Máiréad’s tweets. Of course, when she deleted her Twitter account, that broke the whole thing, and reminded me of the value of owning your own content. So I wanted to build a new version of it which would
I’d also been thinking about just letting AI loose on the whole thing, but I don’t really approve of robots taking over everything. Also I’m a bit old-fashioned, and actually like solving problems.
One of the good things about side projects is that they can be quick and dirty, a chance to experiment with technologies you haven’t used before, a chance to be playful.
In my day job, I often build websites with Drupal, but I didn’t want the hassle of keeping on top of security updates, so I decided to try using Contentful for the back end, and use NextJS to render static HTML for the front end.
To begin with, Contentful seemed pretty good - it was easy to define the content model and get started. However, once we got going with publishing content, and I tried to add a photo from my phone, I was very surprised to find out that the content editing interface isn’t responsive.
I had assumed that in 2025, being able to edit content on a phone would come as standard with any CMS, but I was wrong. Unless I was missing something in Contentful’s documentation, the suggestion seemed to be that I could build an app to connect to the back end. That would have defeated the whole purpose of using a SaaS tool to edit content. For next year, I think I’ll either just build the back end in Drupal, or try to knock up something with GitHub.
The other weird thing about Contentful is that the starter kits are only available for new users - the fact that I’d created an account a few years ago and never got round to using it meant that Contentful didn’t want to help me any more. Thankfully, the NextJS template made it pretty easy to get started.
I’m not a big fan of React and JSX, even though this blog is built in Gatsby. I’m not sure why, maybe because it doesn’t treat HTML with the respect it deserves. That’s a subject for another time, though, along with why Tailwind CSS gives me the creeps.
If you want to look at the code and tell me everything I’ve done wrong, it’s on github.
For now I would like to proudly present the finished product - Máiréad’s Mince Pie Monitor, and go and eat some more mince pies…