Getting Started

So if you're going to get started with Vercel, you'll need an account first, which you can get here.

Then, you can press the New Project button and get to importing your Git Repositories. Once you press the button, you should see a drop down menu on the left, where you can select the repo you want to use.

Having done so, you can produce cool sites like this or this.

Why Is This Important

Vercel is a really simple and great way to automatically deploy stuff. Speaking from experience, whenever I was helping make edits in front-end stuff (although less so for front-end than something like back-end), it was super useful to be able to make a small change then immediately check the effects, without having to go through the slog of doing things within Terminal.

You also don't really need to have a server ready since Vercel will provide all that for you, making it pretty easy to experiment and play around with different things.

Generally, I prefer it a lot more over other CI/CD pipelines. Admittedly, I had some trouble with Vercel, but I actually somewhat understood how it was working, which is a lot more than I can say for other CI/CD pipelines -- it's pretty intuitive and the error messages are somewhat helpful.

Personal Background

Just as some background, I'm a statistician, so I am not the hugest coder. But I spent a solid three, four hours deleting and remaking both repos and 11ty blogs only to realize that I should have just taken a minute to think about how Vercel creates pages and switched to an HTML based blog much, much faster. But on the plus side, I feel like this has taught me a valuable lesson I will forget to apply the next time I'm being salty over something that should work, but just doesn't.

Jokes aside, Vercel is pretty cool -- for the other two blogs I created, they got created in barely a few minutes.

You may also have noticed this is in reverse online cookbook order (this is intentional and also I am sleep deprived, so I'm rambling).