githubme.com

The Problem

I was nearly finished with prosamik.com when I ran into the question of how I would publish blogs. I had previously worked at a WordPress company, so I understood what a CMS did, but I did not know that tools such as Payload CMS already worked well with Next.js. Building my own CMS felt like the obvious solution at the time.

I did not want to build and maintain a full backend just to store articles. I also wanted version control for every post. GitHub already handled storage and version history through README and Markdown files, so I used GitHub as the CMS and rendered those files inside the prosamik.com interface.

The Motivation

Once the idea worked for my portfolio, I wanted to make it useful for anyone with a public GitHub README but no personal website. The rule was simple: replace github.com with githubme.com in a repository or Markdown URL, and the same content would open as a cleaner reading page.

Mistakes

My first mistake was not researching the CMS options that already existed for Next.js. Payload CMS and other maintained tools already solved the publishing problem. I jumped straight into building because the idea felt exciting.

I also assumed that many people wanted to beautify README pages without validating that demand. It was an impulsive product decision, and I built the solution before checking whether enough users cared about the problem.

Learning

githubme.com taught me how to build a landing page that looked much better than my earlier work. On the technical side, I learned how GitHub content and APIs worked, how to connect the frontend and backend directly, and how to proxy requests when the browser could not call a source as expected.

The project had more parsing and rendering logic behind it than the simple URL trick suggested. I became better at building, but I was still focused more on implementation than distribution or understanding what users wanted.

Achievements

The final product could render a README through my own domain by identifying the repository and Markdown file from the URL. It also supported YouTube embeds, which GitHub README pages do not render directly.

A developer could use githubme.com as the public landing page for a project without building a separate site. That was the most useful part of the experiment, even though I did not turn it into a larger business.