I am actually working on Notionpaper v0.2, and here are some of my thoughts on this.
on v0.1, options on SSR or SSG are provided for you to choose.
In fact, Astro, which the framework I used to build this tool is born to be a static site generator, server side rendering is just a plus. I added the SSR option is for visitor to see your site change in real-time, give it more a “CMS” feel.
And when constructing the code, there are lots of compromises are made in order to achieve that purpose, and in the end it does not runs well over the past year, even based on my own experiences.
First is the static files handling issue. When uploading a image, a file, or a video to your Notion page, those files URL will be returned with a validation token by Notion API, which means those URLs will be expired in a certain amount of time. In another words, when under SSG mode, those files needs to be saved locally during runtime, rather directly uses those URLs.
This is tricky considering directly saving files to the output directory /dist is not a standard solution. Although using Endpoints in Astro could generate files in a desired way, but in v0.1, the files are not known in advance (generation happens before the process, which means only knows the URL of each file from each page when that page is generated).
Second is the processing speed problem. Some site meta data, such as site title, description, site favicons, are requested every time the page is generated (for the nav bar). Which can be easily solved by using state management to cache them.
The default i18n support by Astro is file based, even need some config file modification.
Also I haven’t figured out how to set the database to make it i18n.
Might no good solution for now.
I want to make the deployment as simple as possible so that anyone can use this tool.
However, tools like Vercel or Netlify updates when the source code updates. Which works fine only if your posts are one the repository file, like the old Markdown blogging system does.
Under SSG mode, every update on the posts requires another deployment, which is not something like Vercel or Netlify does, its more like a CI/CD job.
Even under SSR mode, each update of Notionpaper code requires another deployment, because like I mentioned, Vercel / Netlify only updates when the codebase updates.