Exis Jaxn

What. The public site and content platform for Exis Jaxn — the musician-and-author project of Bruce Rogers Jackson. Visitors move through a books library (including the three-volume Trillogy poetry set — A Lonesome Long Sit, Tales & Tails on Lifelong Trails, and Driving on Empty), a decade-spanning discography, an author section, an About-the-Author bio, and blog posts — all under a persistent Spotify-style audio player that keeps playing across navigation, with a play button on every track. The discography filters by genre and artist persona (Jazz, Bruce Jackson Compositions, Bruce Jackson Electronic, Jazz Toaster Originals, Bruce Jackson Contemporary, and more) and lays albums onto an interactive 2018–2023 timeline that merges books, albums, tracks, and manual events into one dated stream. Behind the login sits a 20-screen admin: a drag-and-drop landing-page composer, catalog editors for books and albums, a media library, posts, messages, users, and a one-click backup export.

Why. The artist needed to run the whole site himself — hero art, section order, bios, catalog — without calling a developer for every change. So this is a configurable platform rather than a hardcoded site. It also has to serve a physical back-catalog: decades of albums whose metadata only exists on the sleeve.

How. Next.js 15 App Router on Firebase App Hosting, with Firestore as the CMS and real-time listeners so admin edits appear live. The standout is the album importer: photograph an album's back cover and Gemini vision extracts structured metadata — tracklist with durations and composers, band members with instruments, release and composition dates — against a Zod schema. It is told to merge with any existing description rather than overwrite it, and not to guess, because the point is archiving a real catalog rather than inventing one. Track visibility runs on a public < user < family < admin ladder so unreleased work can be shared with family only, and an admin can preview the site as any role without logging out. The PDF viewer is self-hosted pdf.js with the worker vendored locally to keep it out of SSR and the initial bundle.

Stack: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind + shadcn/ui, Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Storage, App Hosting), Google Genkit + Gemini vision, react-pdf/pdf.js, dnd-kit.

Links: Live site

Built Dec 2025 – Jun 2026.