Edgie
A simple webpage to share my social media links. Explaining the motivation behind it and why I believe it's a great first project for aspiring developers. 2021-09-13
Preface
As most of you probably know, I started university about a week ago. As all students are trying to make new friends, everyone is sharing their social media profiles with other people.
When reading around in our faculty's Discord server, a student intro caught my attention. Instead of posting his social media links directly, he posted the following:
When clicking on the above link, I was redirected to a webpage that looked like this:
He was using a website called Linktree to share all his social media links in a single place.
Linktree allows you to create a personalised and easily-customizable page, that houses all the important links you want to share with your audience. Once you've set up your Linktree and added all your links, simply copy your unique Linktree URL and paste it into the 'Website’ field of your Instagram or Twitter bio, or share it in Facebook posts and YouTube Videos. Then, all you need to do is update your Linktree links - you never have to change the link in your bio again!
After reading that, I was hooked. I already had my social media links on my website, but a dedicated page for them would be simpler and easier to understand for people who want to get in contact with me.
Creating Edgie
I could've simply used a website such as Linktree to list all my social media links and be done in 10 minutes, but you know me. That wasn't happening.
I wanted to create my very own version of that website so that I could customize it exactly how I wanted it. It was 22:00 when I had the great idea to try and make the whole thing in one sitting. Fortunately, a few hours later at 2:18 the next morning, I was done! I somehow managed to create the project, initialize a GitHub repo, copy the whole thing on my server through SSH and get a subdomain registered in Cloudflare in less than 5 hours. Yes, I am flexing. If you wish to checkout the live webpage for yourself, click here!
Conclusion
I really like this project because at its core, it is incredibly simple. In fact, a list containing few links in an HTML file hosted on a local machine would work just as well as Edgie. On the other hand, such a project can be made in a scalable way with cloud services, can implement nice animations and can even run on a front-end framework.
I didn't really acquire any new skills while creating Edgie, but I still believe it is a great first project for any aspiring developer because of its simplicity and usefulness.