About This Blog

Recently I've made an effor to update my web publishing skills and it turned out to be a bit of a journey see: What Blog Tech Stack for more details on that.

In the end I settled on NextJS and TailwindCss as the two technologies seemed to compliment each other, hosting on Netflify to purposely work across vendors.

Origins

After no less than 3 generations, I decided that some features have to be built in from the start, and so I leveraged Timothy Lin's NextJS + Tailwinds starter project github to get things rolling.

I've made a few different design decisions, but this was a huge accelerator for me, as I'm not patient or proficient with graphics.

Features, so far

• Easy styling customization with Tailwind 3.0 and primary color attribute
• Near perfect Lighthouse score
• Lightweight, 45kB first load JS, uses Preact in production build
• Responsive: Mobile-friendly views
• Light and dark theme
• Analytics: Supports Plausible, Simple Analytics and Google Analytics
• MDX - write JSX in markdown documents!
• Server-side syntax highlighting with line numbers and line highlighting via rehype-prism-plus
• Math display supported via KaTeX
• Citation and bibliography support via rehype-citation
• Automatic image optimization via next/image
• Flexible data retrieval with mdx-bundler
• SEO Support either per page or per template.
• Support for tags - each unique tag will be its own page
• Support for multiple authors
• Blog templates
• TOC component
• Support for nested routing of blog posts
• Newsletter component with support for mailchimp, buttondown, convertkit and klaviyo
• Supports Comments via: giscus, utterances or disqus
• Preconfigured security headers
• RSS feeds, manifest, robots.txt, sitemaps and more!
• PWA compliant installable web app for Andriod, iOS and compliant browers.