Creating a blog in Next.js

The idea of creating a blog to pen down my thoughts has been in my bucket list for a while now; it's one of those things that gets endlessly delayed as we get swept away by the busy hassles of our lives. Thankfully, I've found the push to finally get this blog up and running after creating my portfolio website. I thought it would be a great addition to the portfolio website to a blog of my own, so here it is!

This blog was created with React and Next.js, frameworks for web development. At this point, I have been using React for several frontend projects, but I was new to Next.js as well as the various features/concepts it introduces such as pre-rendering, server/client-side rendering, static generation and API routes.

So I took it as an opportunity to learn new technologies and understand the web architecture better. Sure, I could have used pre-existing services for blogging like Wordpress or Blogspot, but that wouldn't give me the level of control and customization that creating a blog from scratch brings. Not to mention, learning and tinkering during the process is half the fun!

Currently, the blog gets its post content from markdown files which are bundled together with the application. All content is statically generated (versus server-side rendering) for faster performance. It also features dynamically generated links based on the post id, which is the name of the markdown file.

The next step in upgrading this blog would be to enhance the process of creating new posts by integrating a headless Content Management System (CMS) such that I have a platform to automatically create and push new posts to the blog. Still looking into it!