What is this project?
There are plenty of tools floating around in the world like Trello, Jira, Linear, and whatever else that help you organize your projects into tasks. That's great, but I don't want to use any of those. I don't need all that.
What I want is a simple way to communicate on my personal website the status of a project with high-level tasks that I'm working on.
The motiviation for this project is mostly to test out some ideas that I'd like to use for other projects.
Of course, while I'm working on this project I have no structure for what this page should look like.
What's the current status?
Completed for the most part. We could add some more complexity, but I've learned what I intended to and have something that works well enough for my needs.
What I've learned?
Unsurprisingly, there isn't a good way to read from an Airtable Base without using some kind of secret key, so that throws a wrench in some part of A Commonplace Book. I think I just need to approach it as a bigger task and maybe create a little more infrastructure. It won't be an easily deployed site built with 11ty if I want something like live data updates.
Airtable still makes some sense as the backend data source due to the immense flexibility of the data types even if I don't like some of their API choices.
Next steps
I will begin speccing out what I want to do A Commonplace Book in more detail. This tracker will provide some helpful decoration for that page.
Random thoughts
Airtable's AI chatbot is pushy. It takes a minute to get by it when you sign up for an account.
It also isn't very clever. I asked it to make a field to show the percentage of tasks complete and it tried to prompt an agent with some "you're an expert statistician" junk when all I needed was a formula in a column.
The Airtable documentation is wrong or unclear in a few spots. Reading their code is the best way to understand the intended use.