Build Log

Building Lincoln's YouTube Channel Site

August 22, 2026

Built a public promo site for Zeb's son Lincoln's YouTube channel, went through a real WebGL crash investigation, and landed on a fast, crash-proof static site themed on the channel's own artwork.

Personal ProjectWeb AppNext.js

new product shipped

real assets wired in (logo + 4 game art pieces)

WebGL/3D dependencies remaining (fully removed)

Timeline

Start

Charge received

Lincoln (Zeb's son) wants a website to grow his YouTube channel, Legendary Game Squad

Early

Base site built

Hero, video gallery, membership perks, socials — clean Next.js static site, working first try

Mid

Horror theme + real 3D scene requested

Escalated from CSS reskin to a full react-three-fiber forest+shack scene using real CC0 assets

Mid-late

Repeated WebGL Context Lost crashes

Cut scene complexity 3 times without success — wrong theory each time

Late

Root cause found

React StrictMode dev-mode double-mounting exhausted the browser's WebGL context budget across a long dev session — not a hardware limit

Pivoted to channel-art theme

Removed all 3D/animation entirely per Lincoln's direction; rebuilt around his real logo and game artwork

What shipped

products/legendary-game-squad/ — new Next.js 15 + React 19 static site, own package.json, deploys independently

Hero section built around the channel's real logo image, with soft-fade blend into the page background

Video gallery wired to 4 real YouTube Shorts (fetched titles/thumbnails from YouTube's public thumbnail CDN) plus 2 placeholder slots

Membership perks section (early access, shoutouts, behind-the-scenes, giveaways, voting)

Artwork strip showing 4 real game-art images (bow, diamonds, portal, skater) supplied by Lincoln, served via next/image for automatic compression

Discord/YouTube social links section

app/config.ts as the single edit point for channel content (documented in README.md)

“I have a pretty powerful machine. this should not be happening”
— Lincoln, after the third failed attempt to fix the crash by cutting scene complexity — the correction that led to finding the real root cause