Changelog from our journey

Writing Personal Stories to Fill the Site and Build Trust

Today I'm writing the story about the electrical wiring, the university entrance exam (Konkur), and our hospital experience. I'm writing these for two reasons: first, to start filling up the site with some content, and second, because it might help others better understand the situation I'm in, and maybe they'll trust me more because of it.

I'm waiting to get access to the internet so I can go look for some design inspiration for other parts of the site.

Using Zod with TypeScript for Form Validation

I'm using Zod with TypeScript to validate my forms. It can handle validation both on the frontend (form side) and on the backend (API requests like POST requests). This approach significantly improves data security.

I'm combining it with insights from some tutorial videos and AI tools (like DeepSeek). The things I'm learning right now are newer than what's covered in the courses I've watched, and I couldn't find resources that fully addressed my needs — so I'm moving forward with AI assistance.

First site map

I’m currently working on finding a visual style for the site. So far, I’ve created the blog page, a sample post, and the sitemap. The problem is that we only have one SIM card for internet, so I have to wait until nighttime to start researching and browsing other websites that might spark some ideas for our site’s design. In the meantime, I found a style I like for the portfolio section and I’ve started writing the code for it.

From Payload to Sveltia CMS

My research into how to build a dynamic and free website started with Payload CMS. I had already learned it and honestly thought it was incredible. The plan was to use Neon's free tier for PostgreSQL as the database — that way, I could run a full-featured CMS completely for free. On top of that, it would let Omid build Payload block by block for future projects.

But unfortunately, based on what I found out, deploying Payload on Vercel comes with a lot of headaches. So I switched to a different approach — Sveltia CMS, which is a Git-based CMS. It's essentially still a dynamic site, but with a lightweight panel where we can upload and manage our content. For our situation right now — with all the limitations and restrictions we're dealing with — this approach is more than enough.

Along the way, I pushed to make the site as dynamic as possible, especially giving us real flexibility inside the blog. Thankfully, that part went well and it's working the way I imagined.

Then came deployment and debugging — pushing the project to GitHub and deploying it on Vercel. And honestly, that part is still held up because of the internet.