So I made this blog at the start of my Recurse Center batch. I got it working, but the stack I setup for myself was way too complicated - running a seperate CMS and a database is obviously overkill for a personal blog. I wanted it to parallel the work I had been doing for Radical Directory, and I did get it all setup! One problem though - servers are not free.

I set the Keystone CMS up on Render, but later found out that their free-tier databases become not-free after a certain number of months, and I don’t want to pay for anything except the domain name, so I started looking into solutions.

One idea was to move my content onto Sanity and use their free tier. But I didn’t want to learn their special Query Language unless I had to. The other idea was to do what many programmers do: ditch the backend entirely and store all text content as Markdown files in the frontend repo. So this is what I’m doing now!

Despite its humble beginnings, I do have medium-sized dreams for this website, so I figured I should set it up for MDX parsing. MDX is a superset of Markdown that lets you write JSX inline. So if I ever want custom components in my blog posts, that will be easy now.

I’m using Hashicorp’s next-mdx-remote library to parse the MDX. It lets you load and serialise the MDX within Next.js’s getStaticProps. The data fetching code for this page looks like this:

const postFilePaths = fs.readdirSync(POSTS_PATH).filter((path) => /\.mdx?$/.test(path));

export const getStaticPaths: GetStaticPaths = async () => {
  return {
    paths: postFilePaths.map((filePath) => ({
      params: { slug: filePath.slice(0, -4) },
    })),
    fallback: false,
  };
};

export const getStaticProps: GetStaticProps = async ({ params }) => {
  const slug = (params?.slug as string) || "";
  const source = readFileSync(path.join(POSTS_PATH, slug + ".mdx"));

  const { content, data } = matter(source);
  const mdxSource = await serialize(content);

  return { props: { post: { data, slug, source: mdxSource } } };
};

For reference,

• postFilePath returns an array of .mdx files in a given directory
• matter is from the gray-matter library for parsing YAML frontmatter: used for putting metadata at the start of a Markdown file.
• The serialise function comes from next-mdx-remote. I think what it does is convert the MDX into JSON, which get passed as a prop to the page component and from there passed into the <MDXRemote /> component which renders it.

So now I’m writing my posts in VSCode/Vim, which is really fine for me. And the best part is I don’t have to worry about more than one service, and for static websites that service is free! (Currently on Render but could easily be Vercel or any other)