How we built thelinkage.club

This site has to do three jobs: publish design and tech writing, collect good links from the community, and grow a waitlist. Here's the stack, and why each piece is there.

The stack

Layer	Choice	Why
Framework	Next.js 16 (App Router)	Static pages where possible, server code where needed
Styling	Tailwind CSS 4	Brand colours as theme tokens, no separate CSS to manage
Our posts	MDX files in the repo	Write in Markdown, publish with a git push
Member posts, links, waitlist	Neon Postgres	Serverless Postgres, connected through Vercel in two clicks
Hosting	Vercel	Preview deploys for every change

Posts live in two places

Posts we write are .mdx files. Each one exports its title, topic and date, and the file name becomes the URL. They're built into static pages, so they load instantly.

Posts from members arrive through a form and land in Postgres as pending. Nothing goes live until it's approved in a small admin page. Once approved, the post appears in the Journal next to ours, with the writer's name and link on it.

No backend to babysit

Forms use React Server Actions, so there's no separate API to maintain. The database tables create themselves on first use. If the schema doesn't exist yet, the app runs create table if not exists before its first query.

Neon's HTTP driver talks to Postgres over plain fetch, which suits serverless functions: no connection pool to manage, no cold-start connection storms.

Keeping spam out

• A hidden honeypot field that only bots fill in
• A rate limit per visitor, stored as a salted hash, never a raw IP
• A human review for every link and every member post

Simple, and enough for a community that's still small.

What it costs

Vercel's free tier and Neon's free tier cover a site like this comfortably. The only real cost is the domain.

Building something similar? Tell us about it, or share your favourite dev read.