Earlier this week, I wanted to relaunch my personal blog on all new systems to reduce my barrier to shipping. For this very first day of rebuilding, I didn’t care about the design just yet. To achieve my goals of ultimate blog system velocity, I wanted a single source of truth for blog posts and newsletters.

After a bit of research, I learned that you can connect any Notion board to any website, and you can connect your blog’s RSS feed into a Buttondown account. At the end of the day, this means you can write a post in Notion, mark it “Done”, and automatically see that post on your public blog and have a newsletter go out for it. This also means I can write and publish easily from my phone (like I am now).

Here was my basic to-do list that I managed to finish in a day:

• Clone Vercel’s simple blog template

• Add environment variables from the Notion board I use to draft blog posts

• Add some code to ensure the blog posts listed are calling the API that gets data from my Notion board

• Add some code to create an RSS feed for my blog

• Create a Buttondown account

• Add my RSS feed to the feed settings in Buttondown

• Redesign my site 1,000 times to ensure it captures my entire personal brand perfectly. Ignore all urges to procrastinate by redesign

It was a pretty quick and painless process with some help from Cursor on embarrassingly small things. In the end I decided to set up the Buttondown integration such that new blog posts become a draft. It’s all set up to send, but this way I can choose to skip some posts, or double check everything before it ships to inboxes (the three family members who don’t even know I’ve signed them up to follow my professional life).

It’s obviously very much a work in progress. I need to actually style my site with some personality. But, it’s been fun trying out new-to-me tools and getting back into code (even if I have a copilot).

Having a nicely integrated set up like this isn’t free! Here’s what I’m paying for:

• Domain - DNSimple - $8/year

• Hosting - Vercel - $0

• Newsletter - Buttondown - $90/year

• Temporary Coding Help - Cursor Pro - $21.03/month

Any other tips and tricks for me? Would love to hear what you all are using.