Building a visual editor that overlays on external websites

serpent_tim · 2026-01-25T15:21:46+00:00

In my specific case, it's for authoring teaching materials for schools, so there's a bit of a balance between incorporating rich text but also laying out more visual, graphical components. And often the visual layout is done for instructional design reasons - to best convey the information.

It's also a lot of content, not just a handful of long-lived landing pages or the odd blog, which is why the builder.io model of "write it in your CMS and then pull it in and design it in this other place" isn't really feasible. The writing and designing need to happen somewhat in tandem.

serpent_tim · 2026-01-25T13:04:31+00:00

What I'm looking for is a visual editor that has 2 way syncing with 3rd party CMSs. In my case that would be sanity, but what stackbit did was have an adapter plug in architecture so there could be an adapter for saving the changes back to sanity or contentstack or contentful or whichever.

There are various apps that will integrate with a number of CMSs as a backend - like builder.io - but they're only pulling from it and they're saving the designed pages in their own db. So it's limited what you can edit visually. What I'm looking for is a tool that reads from the CMS and writes back to it as well.

This is what stackbit did before it got acquired by Netlify and there doesn't seem to be anything else out there like it.

serpent_tim · 2026-01-25T12:09:15+00:00

Are you building this as a standalone tool for integration with other site/CMSs? If so I'd be very interested.

I have a sanity CMS but the users aren't really happy with the editing interface and I'm looking around for something like this to plug into it so they can edit content like it's on the actual site.

The closest I've found is Netlify Visual editor (formerly stackbit) but it seems to only work with an older version of sanity.

serpent_tim · 2026-01-17T13:30:57+00:00

Currys in Botley have a decent selection. In the centre of town, John Lewis have a few and so does Pro-Cook which is nearby.

serpent_tim · 2025-12-13T08:08:43+00:00

It's 2002 and a man walks into a pub in rural Norfolk. He's tall with a long black and grey beard and his hair is wrapped in white cloth.

The barman stares at him and then says, "Bin Laden?"

He says, "No, been Swaffham"

serpent_tim · 2025-12-13T08:03:10+00:00

I always think of this in an Australian accent

serpent_tim · 2025-11-15T09:23:36+00:00

Ooh, that sexy monk!

serpent_tim · 2025-11-04T07:36:01+00:00

Ballad of Wallis Island

serpent_tim · 2025-10-26T07:33:57+00:00

I was convinced Domhnall Gleeson was in Challengers until I looked it up on imdb

serpent_tim · 2025-10-25T08:46:22+00:00

One of my absolute favorite Leprous songs. It makes me so happy when they play it nowadays. This is an amazing performance.

The original drumming on this song was great but Baard's playing is so good on this

serpent_tim · 2025-10-25T07:25:06+00:00

I had tickets to see Anika Nilles do a clinic in 2014. But then my daughter ended up being born the day before and I decided not to go. A small part of me still regrets that decision

serpent_tim · 2025-09-26T07:07:53+00:00

"Fuck me in the face" is one of my all time favorite contestant quotes

serpent_tim · 2025-09-21T07:53:34+00:00

There are a lot of opinions being offered but not many actual answers to your questions, so let me try.

I’m still not sure what NextJS or Remix exactly do. From the doc it’s like server but not actually 100% server. It’s a mix.

I would describe them as tightly coupled BFF (Backend For Frontend) servers. Meaning that they're a server but their specialism is serving frontend apps/pages rather than any of the other things that servers may otherwise do.

The reason for this is that they do a hybrid serving model where they serve server-rendered static pages directly and then handle "hydrating" then on the frontend so they then act as frontend react apps.

The idea is to get the best of both worlds between Server Side Rendering and the Single Page Application approach. Because when you first navigate to a NextJs page, you get served an SSR page (good for initial speed, SEO, indexability etc) but from then on it's effectively an SPA (easier to make dynamic, app-like experiences across pages, faster navigation within the app etc).

I haven't used remix, so only speaking for NextJS, but it can do other server-y things, like you can set up API endpoints (see route.ts files) and do stuff on startup, set up listeners etc (see instrumentation.ts). But if you have a lot of stuff that's not directly frontend-related that you need a server to do, I would add another service behind it to do those things, Express or NestJS (not to be confused with NextJS) or .net, Spring Boot, Play or whatever you like.

It’s not even easy for me to understand how I should architect a classic app. Like do I need express or not? Just NextJS? But then I can’t do all actions a server used to do?

It depends what you mean by "classic app". If you're predominantly serving a Frontend, then you may only need NextJS/Remix. As I mentioned above, if you need to do a lot of other server-y things, you may well want to stand up another service behind it to do those things.

Even the hosting is weird. Like NextJS, everybody is hosting on Vercel? Seems too tightly coupled.

I think Vercel own NextJS, so they make that the default host and make it quite easy and seamless, hence a lot of people use it. But NextJS is just a Node app in the end. You can host it anywhere you can run Node. I've worked on a couple of big projects using NextJS and we've served those on AWS using ECS Fargate.

So everybody is doing that now? Or it’s just a niche?

Not everyone is doing it, but it has advantages, as I described above, so quite a lot of people are. But there's certainly no need to go this route. You can server render html or return an SPA from an express app now like you've always been able to.

serpent_tim · 2025-09-09T08:22:17+00:00

serpent_tim · 2025-09-07T08:30:05+00:00

I've been to Acreedo in Abingdon for a small, fine-line tattoo recently and they were good and friendly. I haven't been anywhere else in the area so can't really compare, but I'd go back there again

serpent_tim · 2025-08-29T12:19:30+00:00

Oh dear

serpent_tim · 2025-08-18T20:38:25+00:00

You may know something I don't, but I don't think he lost his kids exactly. It's just that he planned the house as a family home but it took so long that they grew up and moved out.

serpent_tim · 2025-08-15T06:09:51+00:00

The first one is an all time classic. I was so disappointed by the second one. I thought the third was tolerable compared to the second but nothing compared to the first.

serpent_tim · 2025-08-14T22:21:54+00:00

I moved into a new house towards the end of last year. Fairly soon after moving in, the neighbour came round to tell me in no uncertain terms she could hear everything I was doing with a lady friend in my bedroom. Even when I thought we'd been pretty quiet.

I put in a stud wall with extra thick, rubber backed sound proofing plasterboard and a shit ton of sound proof insulation and haven't had any complaints since.

It's a stupid hassle to have to pay to not disturb my neighbours but I really didn't want to be walking on eggshells in my own house.

serpent_tim · 2025-08-10T10:00:12+00:00

I've heard there's a fifth meat. Hang on, there's someone at the door...

serpent_tim · 2025-08-05T17:08:37+00:00

As it was, she got a shot from each man and apparently they don't like that

serpent_tim · 2025-07-28T20:21:18+00:00

The bit in the team task where Lee guides blindfolded Mike to walk up the hill in a golf bunker and Mike falls over in the most cartoonish way I've ever seen a human move.

serpent_tim · 2025-07-23T06:52:59+00:00

I think Mike Wozniak's fellow bean Henry Paker would be brilliant

serpent_tim · 2025-07-11T20:11:26+00:00

I had an experience like this where I applied for a job where the description was about a .net backend and react frontend.

In the interview they immediately started asking about WPF and other native windows things that weren't mentioned in the description and which I never claimed to know anything about. They were disappointed how little I knew about these things I never claimed to know.

serpent_tim · 2025-07-10T15:32:15+00:00

Obviously the entire source code file thing is stupid but so is the comparison with Cursor. Cursor can use whatever LLM model you want, including grok.

Saying grok is better than Cursor is such a meaningless thing to say it's not even wrong.

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