Bike Gear Database

I'll be frank - I come from a human-centered design background and I am learning a lot about SEO - how to design, build, and create content that satisfies the machines. Machine-centered design ;)

V1 of BGDB was done in Firebase and React to the chagrin of one of my advisors who is an SEO pro.

For V2, I created a server-side Node/Express application that output static HTML. This satisfied (most of) the machines and I was happy. UNTIL I needed to add any interactivity whatsoever. I spent a few hours monkeying with Jquery form validation before I asked myself "what the hell am I doing?".

For this version, I settled on static page generation with NextJS and hosted on Vercel. What. A. Move. I should have done this from the start. The site is lightning fast and a pleasure to build. It took a few days to learn how to create static pages and use React Hooks/UseEffect. Whatever I had fun, didn't 'i?

Anyway, check it out!

I have always wanted to create a digital product that involved my passion for bicycles. Apart from cloning Strava, I had no idea what to do - until recently.

A few months back, I started looking for a new mountain bike that could double as a bike-packing setup. I spent weeks pouring over the details and comparing different build kits from many different manufacturers. I was frustrated that there was no uniformity in how manufacturers presented their data. Comparing across brands was near impossible.

Bike data is all pretty standard - build kits and geometry tend to be very similar but might be labeled differently. This started me thinking about how I could scrape and normalize the data for everyone to use.

Use cases include:

• search/comparison for making more informed purchasing decisions
• data embed for review sites/bloggers
• quick/easy reference for mechanics/bike shops

I am also very interested in adding BGDB reviews as part of the site to help generate SEO traffic.

So far the stack is - nextjs/vercel and data storage in Firestore (might move to AWS at some point).

Anyway, I'm super happy and for once having fun with my side project!