RADIKAL

This is the name of the second EP by IDHEM, a versatile electronic artist with influences like Justice and James Blake. He’s also been an indirect mentor to me—his tracks have been a huge inspiration for my sound.

IDHEM has been a solid collaborator over the years. I’ve handled most of the landing pages for his rollouts.

A Newsletter, but Without Vendor Lock-in

People usually go for newsletter platforms like Mailchimp or Brevo to set up an email opt-in form. Personally, I avoid them—they inject JavaScript that slows down the page and make styling a pain.

IDHEM only needs to collect emails for now since this is his first time adding an opt-in form to a landing page. So, I went with Pocketbase: one simple table (emails) and a Shadcn input form. No lag, no bloat. Just works.

Using Pocketbase

Pocketbase is a sick backend solution—super easy to self-host on any VPS.

GCP gives you a free e2-micro instance every month, so I spun one up to run Pocketbase on.

To serve it over HTTPS, I set up NGINX, generated SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt, and used a subdomain on sifdine.com.