lensi.xyz

This photo blogging website brings together two great passions of mine: photography and coding. I enjoy working on projects that feature a mix of my different interests. The original version of lensi.xyz was built with Astro and its content fetched from markdown files. There was no CDN integration for images, and every single update — content or otherwise — had to be pushed to Github before it was visible on the website. I wanted to change that, desperately.

And so I opted for building this latest version with Next.JS and Payload. Utilising a CMS makes uploading and working with images so much easier. The additional benefit of choosing Payload is because of how straightforward it is to store those images in another location. I’ve moved them out of source code into their own dedicated S3 bucket, which itself integrates with Cloudflare Images allowing me to perform additional optimisations and transformations. No doubt overkill for a humble photographer’s amateur pictures, but that’s where the coding passion comes into play — I love this kind of stuff.