Women Don’t Cycle is a 2022 documentary by my Slowby co-founder Manon Brulard. It is a film about what it means to be a woman cycling in different countries around the world.

The documentary was shot during an eleven-month bicycle touring trip from Brussels to Tokio, with our other co-founder Dries (more about their trip).

Other than cheering from the proverbial sidelines, I was not involved in Manon & Dries’ trip or the making of this documentary. But, I do have the privilege of maintaining its website today!

Dries had originally made a landing page for the documentary in plain HTML, using the Story template from HTML5 Up, to promote it for screening requests.

After 120 exclusive screenings in venues globally, we decided that it was time to share the documentary with the internet at large. For this occasion, I made some adjustments to the website:

• I kept the same template, but fueled it with the Astro static-site generation engine to simplify HTML templating in three languages.
• I wrapped it with the Git-based Tina CMS to manage screening information (formerly managed by copy-pasting HTML!).
• To show reviews on the site without our manual intervention, I leveraged a low-code solution. Tally forms input syncs with a Notion database, which in turn feeds into Astro’s server-side build via the Notion API. Paginated reviews are loaded client-side in Astro with a dynamic Svelte island.