… You know the rest. And if you don’t, now you do.

I have spent a considerable amount of time and money over the years tracking down records, mostly in the hardcore punk and metal genres. Over the years my fanaticism has waxed and waned, but the interest has been there since high school when I discovered that you could even buy the damn things (I had plenty of CDs at that point). My friends who were into hardcore at time time introduced me to the world of collecting, and as I watched them obsess over pressing details, I became hooked myself. I believe the first hardcore record I ever purchased was a Judge “New York Crew” 7” at Bull Moose Music in Lewiston, Maine.

I don’t still own many of those original records - moving cross country multiple times and being desperately broke at other times has caused me to sell records in the past - including that Judge EP (I even had an early Rev pressing on Blue vinyl with an orange cover that I got in New York City! Also gone). But I’ve also accumulated a lot in those years as well, expanding my New York Hardcore taste into other various genres of hardcore.

New Site

Back in the depths of Covid, I was trying to find things to fill my time “productively”, in ways that meant I could spend more time with these records. At the time, I realized I wasn’t listening to my record collection enough — a collection that has grown and shrunk.After all, what else are they for but to listen to?

So, I began posting photos of my records and writing little reviews on Instagram in 2022. Revisiting these records felt like a good way to reflect on why I’ve kept them, share them with friends, and document them with photos and personal anecdotes.

After posting there for about a year or two, with sporadic focus, I decided I needed a break from Instagram and social media in general. I wanted to step away from contributing to the dismal state of social media. But as a technologist, I also wanted to build something new.

So, I decided to write my own review site. I’d integrate it with a CMS so I could publish timely reviews (yeah right…). I’d try some new technologies so I could flex some muscles. I’d have fun with it! At least that was the idea.

The intent isn’t a zine or a formal review site - just my personal thoughts on my personal collection. Since these are records I’ve intentionally purchased, they’re generally ones I like, so things are going to skew in the positive! I don’t buy everything that comes out in genres I follow; I try to curate my collection. Moving frequently has reinforced that approach—anyone who has moved with records knows what a hassle it is.

Any content that was migrated from Instagram is the same as the original Instagram posts, and the images as well - I was able to migrate the photos out of Instagram using one of their migration tools. Getting this data into Contentful is a somewhat arduous task since it is all manual. If you see missing images, photos, etc, that’s why. This is a work in progress. Moving forward, net-new reviews will only live on this site. Those will be denoted differently on the review detail page…somehow.

Tech Stack

I built the site on Next.js 15, using GraphQL and API calls to pull content from Contentful. The site is hosted on Vercel.

The Contentful data modelling was challenging due to Contentful’s limitations on how you create entity relationships. I had to decide if the relationship was going to be Album => Artist, or Artist => Album. Then figure out where the Genre tag belonged. In the end, the flow ended up being Artist => Album => Review. This means when creating a net-new review, I need to first create the Artist, then the album, then the review, since they are dependent upon each other in that order.

The calls are server side via internal API that then make requests up to CFL, or AWS in the case of the contact form. There are some bugs here and there and the UI isn’t great, and there are a few ideas on the roadmap, but it’s functional. The majority of the work I need to do now is just manually enter all that content!

Road Map / Ideas

• Map: I thought it would be cool to create an interactive global map showing where all the artists are located. I’d use an interactive data visualization library
• Search: Search at the moment is kind of broken.
• Design: The design is pretty blah. I’m using DaisyUI, but I literally lifted the logo from JIRA’s avatar library.
• Browse by Year: A way to browse reviews / albums by year.
• Album of the Year: Maybe a way to see the highest reviewed album(s) for any given year?