6h Today I did a lot of work on my mbta app. I focused on layout stuff in the day and trying to get it posted to github pages at night. Neither one was flawless, but the night stuff got hairy! I was working with a forked repo for the base that had a lot of dependencies with security issues, so I tried to fix those and broke things. I next rolled back and tried to post as-is and that was not nearly the smooth experience I had last time. I looked into it and I think it may be because last time I had a pretty simple create-react-app and was all in their ecosystem. My next move was to start over with the intention of copying the comparatively small amount of code into a create-react-app build so I could get deploying working right. I think that was the right move, but installing all of the dependencies and getting it all wired up has taken some time.

Looking at it from a full day perspective I’m happy with my results. I got a few new features added, cleaned up the look a bit, and figured out a few more css gotchas. One thing that is stupidly difficult for me is figuring out relative paths from one file to another. It seems like it always takes a long time for me to figure it out. Hopefully soon it will click. It sure does make you feel dumb to not know how to tell the server where something is!

EDIT: I figured out the dependencies AND the server paths. It turns out I was doing it right, but you just can’t serve files from outside of the public folder! Here is the link to the site. It’s no beauty queen, but it’s getting better every day and it is a great tool to play with react on.