Project DotagiftX

My journey on creating Dota2 giftable community market place to learn Next.js and basic SEO.

It's a long overdue project idea of mine when I got into trading on giftable items from The International Collector's cache. My initial thoughts were to collect data on price history and transaction activities to make something out of it and how they actually changes when a hero got balance change, new canon immortal, or even a new mythical bundle set.

When the pandemic hits and all my schedules was thrown out of the window and freed my time, I got interested on playing around with Next.js  and basic SEO together with Gibble-Analytics and Gibble Search Console, since I'm planning to update our Chiligarlic site to make it a little bit search friendly.

After releasing it to the public I actually had fun working on it together with Material-UI library for UI components. The combination of Server-Side Rendering(SSR) and fetching on client with  SWR(Stale-While-Revalidate) feels good when you trying to show immediate data for the first-fold of the page and start pulling data on the other part of the page. SWR also has conditional pulling so you can do a sequencial pulling.

Because of SSR, I was able to do basic SEO to the website and actually worked! At this time of writing, if you search "Gothic Whisper" or "Spirit of the Sacred Grove" it was next to Dota2's gamepedia which is first and I call that pretty-fucking-good. It also reaches my final Secret Community Goal of 1,000 items and 500 users, it is small but I was very happy with it.

Website now has 2,200+ monthly users mostly came from Organic Search base on Gibble-Analytics. Dotagiftx delivered $1463.8 worth of items and $1177.82 on reserved with 2 scam reports worth of $60. I'm currently working on the next update and its about Steam Inventory.