2023 Blog Refresh

I updated my blog this weekend and wanted to share some thoughts along the way:

• Content Management
• Performance
• Opinions

Content Management

I've moved my content from HTML to vanilla Markdown, to MDX, to a CMS, and back to MDX over the years. My content requirements as of now are:

1. Written in Markdown¹
2. Support for syntax highlighting, embedded tweets, and other components
3. Managed through version control²
4. Minimal external dependencies

My goal was to simplify without giving up too many features.

Retrieving Content

You can go surprisingly far with just Node.js and JavaScript. You'll notice a theme start to emerge in this blog post: fewer dependencies, and more copy/paste-able code.

I removed the following libraries:

• contentlayer
• next-contentlayer
• rehype-autolink-headings
• rehype-pretty-code
• rehype-slug
• remark-gfm
• shiki

import fs from 'fs';
import path from 'path';

function getMDXFiles(dir) {
  return fs.readdirSync(dir).filter((file) => path.extname(file) === '.mdx');
}

function readMDXFile(filePath) {
  let rawContent = fs.readFileSync(filePath, 'utf-8');
  return parseFrontmatter(rawContent);
}

function getMDXData(dir) {
  let mdxFiles = getMDXFiles(dir);
  return mdxFiles.map((file) => {
    let { metadata, content } = readMDXFile(path.join(dir, file));
    let slug = path.basename(file, path.extname(file));
    return {
      metadata,
      slug,
      content,
    };
  });
}

export function getBlogPosts() {
  return getMDXData(path.join(process.cwd(), 'content'));
}