go to the site
"what is this site, really?"
Last week, I was mulling over FlyLocal.io's speed issues.
As an exercise, I made a list of all the things that the FlyLocal website does.
- [1] get data from a server three times
- [2] display data on a map, twice
- [3] display data on a page, once
I let it ruminate that, by design, all the heavy lifting, all the processing, is already being done by Airtable.
From a technical perspective, the site is really just a *viewer* of our product, and our product is Airtable data.
***
Then I thought about all the previous iterations of the site.
It occurred to me that all the fancy stuff I'd done in Bubble v1 and pre-Bubble was for a business model that no longer existed.
There was nothing fancy about this *new* model. No forms, no calculations. Get data, display data.
And it occurred me that all the time-consuming stuff I'd done with Bubble v2 over the last year was really about me learning Bubble and figuring out how to get it to do the stuff that I already knew that websites could do: Get data, display data.
And really, there was nothing all that time-consuming about getting data and displaying data, especially in 2021.
***
So... I decided to take a couple days and make a website. And I'm pleasantly surprised with how quickly it all came together.
Hand-coded from the ground up on a modern, popular web-dev framework, it's lean, snappy, mobile-first, it has an elegant backend, and it checks all of my boxes.
It still needs some css TLC, but all the major dev is complete.
v5, for your consideration