Notion Blog with AI Translation
I wanted a place to record some of my recent travel memories and plans for the future, especially since I’m not planning to do any more traveling until next year. I do this every year; it’s a kind of reflection period for me, and it’s become more meaningful as I get older and try to be more intentional about my future travel choices.
I also wanted it to be simple to maintain, localized into different languages, and, honestly, a space to experiment with AI context engineering. It’s been my side “hobby” over the past few weeks. I want to understand how much of this new technology is actually helpful (or not).
From experience, I’ve learned that starting a new project entirely from scratch just by prompting doesn’t really work. So when I found this interesting Notion API blog built with Node.js, I decided to use it as the boilerplate for my own project. I made a few design changes to give it more of a travel journal or diary feel.
I’ve been able to apply so many cool ideas using Claude Code and Google Chrome Developer MCP, including:
Adjusting the overall design, meta tags, and HTML structure
Integrating it with my Notion database (the source of all the content, written entirely by me, as I’m not a fan of using AI for writing, just for grammar corrections).
Setting up localization via the Anthropic API, which translates all the content automatically
Configuring routing (a crucial one for SEO, especially for a localized website)
Replacing Vercel with Netlify
This setup makes me happy because now I can write directly in my Notion app from my phone or any device, and that content automatically becomes part of my Node.js site hosted on Netlify.
I also love that AI handles the automatic translations and sends them back to my Notion database. It’s a really nice workflow, since I can go back to Notion anytime and make manual edits to the localized pages.
Google and Reddit helped me fix a few things that Claude took ages (and many, many tokens) to solve to the point it used all of it, which made me continue the project by myself. This is especially true when configuring builds with web hosting platforms. The systems are flawed. There are so many different routing configurations, and it’s not always clear which one to use. It can end up in a constant loop.
Sometimes it’s just better to read the documentation:
https://docs.netlify.com/build/configure-builds/overview/
It also didn’t know about this lowercase convention in Netlify, which was completely breaking my builds because I had set up my database using uppercase pt-BR.
https://answers.netlify.com/t/how-to-disable-uppercase-urls-are-redirected-to-lowercase-urls-feature/89469
(I made the repo with the AI changes public too!) Don’t forget about the lowercase rule for languages with regional variants. I lost so much time trying to fix it, believing it was a routing issue caused by Claude.
References
Original repo with vercel: https://github.com/samuelkraft/notion-blog-nextjs