Building this Website

In this post I'll walk through some of my thoughts on building this website. This website was built using NextJS, ContentLayer, MDX, and Tailwind.

Why I built this blog

I primarily built this blog so I could have a place to publish things that I write. Mainly on things I may be reading or learning about at the time. I also wanted to get better at writing, and I figured there's no better way to do so then to actually just start writing. Forcing myself to publish things somewhere — and having some arbitrary weekly deadline — would also likely push me to write more as well. Another motivation to build this blog was also to have it as an excuse to learn about certain technologies.

Why I picked these technologies

Part of why I picked NextJS because it's a framework that is used at Spotify, and so as a result I am somewhat familiar with it. NextJS pre-renders every page and most of the pages in this blog (at least to start) will not have dynamic data. This should hypothetically lead to better performance and SEO, which is also part of why I decided to use NextJS.

My motivation for using ContentLayer and MDX mainly revolved around the desire to create as little friction as possible for writing and publishing onto this blog. ContentLayer is a tool that allows you to transform content (in this case plain text markdown files) into JSON that can be used in your application. Using ContentLayer allows me the flexibility to write simple markdown and thus focus on writing without the friction of thinking about the application code. MDX is another tool that allows me to use JSX in markdown content. I decided to use this in case I wanted to be able to use React components in my blog posts. That sort of in a way defeats the original purpose of frictionless writing, but hey, at least it's completely optional!

Tailwind I decided to pick simply due to it's popularity and wanting to try it out for myself.

Just Show Me The Code!

If you're interested in merely seeing the code to this blog you can view it on my GitHub!