blog2

Overview

This repository contains the Next.js project for my blog at https://hxann.com.

The project is my second attempt at making a Next.js blog. Last time with a database, now I store images, posts & pages directly in the repo. So without a database, you can just npm run dev and be on your way.

Who is interested in this?

If you're interested in using this repo as a blog, I think you should already be interested in practicing Next.js/React. It is trivial to write new blog posts, though to utilize the power of MDX (an extension of Markdown), you should be aware of its capability of interpolating React components into the Markdown. It is extensible, but it is non-trivial for a non-developer to do that.

Features

Posts & pages are of MDX format.
Has all of the goodies of an MDX.
MDX has frontmatter that provides meta about the post/page. Checkout the types/blog.ts file.
I utilized the hashicorp/next-mdx-remote library, which parses MDX and renders into HTML tags. It uses unified under the hood. It can also renders React components from the MDX.
Multiple authors permitted.
Leveraging the unified ecosystem. There's a custom plugin for fetching placeholder images in the markdown and pass it into the next/image's Image component.
The order of the h1 title tag & cover image are adjustable within the MDX file.
Simple blog archive, sorted by DESC date, paginated.
next-seo for the SEO, configured for the home page, posts and pages.
next-sitemap for the sitemap.
Some blog configurations are available in blog.config.ts, including:
- The list of navbar links to show (currently only allow links to the pages, not an arbitrary URL)
- Blog name
- Blog description
- Number of posts on the home page
- Number of posts in each archive page
- The blog's banner image URL
- Copyright information
Styled using Tailwind CSS. Dark mode toggle.
ESLint & Prettier & TypeScript setup.

How to run

Checkout the package.json file. When I develop, I use npm run dev. When I deploy, I go to Vercel and deploy. I don't use the build script manually.

Writing

Just copy a blog post and change things up, won't ya?

No, but seriously. All of the available frontmatter fields are written in the types/blog.ts file.

The # Markdown heading (which renders to h1 in HTML) and the cover image should be available in the post's Markdown. The post's excerpt is recommended as the first line after the # heading.

Images are stored in the public/images folder. Reference them in the Markdown in the format of /images/my-image.jpg.

Pages and posts are very similar.

Pages could be linked to the navbar. Posts are not.
Pages don't have cover image.

Here's a general workflow for creating a post:

(Optional) Add your author profile to the content/authors.ts file.
Go create a post in content/posts folder. Remember to follow the above requirements.
If you find out that you need something more advanced than texts and code blocks, you should be comfortable creating a new MDX component if it's not available. Go create them in components/mdx, and register them in the pages/[slug].tsx file. Then include them in the MDX, just don't use import. Check out this hashicorp/next-mdx-remote repo section for the reason behind that.
You should see your post now.

What is "slug"?

It's used for rendering the post/page's URL. If a post/page has a slug of the-post, then the URL would be https://example.com/the-post. That's it.