Ian Evanoff

Chicago, IL

Site update: Dep updates, date formatting & bye, preact šŸ‘‹

Happy to report I have actually been working on my site over the past few weeks, in addition to writing real blog posts of substance.
Just thought Iā€™d jot some notes down on what Iā€™ve done so far, in case itā€™s useful to anyone, including Future Me:
  • I updated allll the deps. Nobelium upstream updated its own deps a scant 4 months ago, and yet so much was still out of date, which just goes to show how quickly the JS & React ecosystems move. I jumped up to React 18.
  • When I did this, however, I found my site broken on deploy. Thatā€™s how I learned Nobelium is one of several NextJS projects that swaps in preact for React in Production only. I donā€™t mean to shade the authors of the libā€¦ but Iā€™m an Oldā„¢ļø who has had a lot of Prod only bugs I didnā€™t intend for; the idea of using a completely different library with completely different authors and a reasonably different API (especially in the case of React 18) in Prod only gives me the wig. So, I killed that config and pulled preact from my deps. Premature optimization, etc etc.
  • I also updated react-notion-x, the base Notion renderer, which was two major versions ahead and had completely restructured its component folder structure and import properties on the NotionRenderer. Initially I got some warnings about importing empty components that I had to track down, but I think Iā€™m good now.
  • Nobelium came with a lightweight locale loader and a simple date format function, which is cool and thoughtful! But letā€™s face it: I am never ever going to maintain the other localesā€”Iā€™m thrilled Iā€™m writing blog posts in English, let alone other languagesā€”so I pulled those. The date formatter was funking up my timezone, so I grabbed date-fns and did a little refactoring to get something I liked. It feels good to leave the dinosaur that is MomentJS behind, but still have a thin barrier between me and the native JS Date object.
  • Lastly, I did a few a11y touchups: removing all but one <main> element, adding aria-hidden as needed, making sure links and clickable elements had some sort of descriptor text, etc.
Description: yarn upgrade-interactive at the command line saying ā€œNo upgrades found.ā€ Truly an amazing feeling.
Description: yarn upgrade-interactive at the command line saying ā€œNo upgrades found.ā€ Truly an amazing feeling.
I didnā€™t want to get in my own way and prevent working on my own site, so I didnā€™t structure this work in the form of a PR that could be contributed upstream, but I may do so later this year if I have time.
Next up is, hopefully, some actual design work! šŸ¤ž
 
 

Ā© ian evanoff 2025