Why I built my own blog

For some time now, I been longing to start writing and blogging again. I previously wrote on Medium quite a bit and was an avid consumer of content on Medium in the early days. But things changed when click-bait became a common curse amongst many Medium posts. Slowly and slowly I found myself consuming less on Medium and more on Twitter. Adding the recent uprise of paywalls, I decided to look for an alternative solution.

Can I use Notion?

I love Notion. With more and more of my life moving onto Notion, I figured Notion would be a nature fit. The challenge there is while I can create multiple pages to be public, it lacked features that were important to me if I wanted to take this seriously. It lacked Google Analytics tracking and other social features such as a signup form.

What about using their API?

They don't currently have a public API but I figured I can reverse engineer their existing on to use. Well... it's not that easy after all 🙃

As you can see, the API is pretty cryptic and hard to understand. So, I decided to give up on that. Maybe at a later date when they release their offial API, I will move my blog to be powered by them.

What about a headless CMS?

These are becoming popular these days. Some include:

• ButterCMS
• Contentful
• Contentstack and many more.

I decided against them because:

1. They were expensive
2. They didn't have very good support for code snippets
3. Limited customization

Let's just build our own, right? Lately, I been looking into using Nextjs. I picked it up over a year ago but didn't do much with it. The promise of writing React with all the benefits of server side rendering, SEO friendliness, speed, and 1 command deploy is very appealing.

The challenge is getting my .MD files to a page, then getting a way to get a list of all my posts in an organized way.

This was a challenge.

I was inspired by Dan Abramov's overreacted.io that is built using Gatsbyjs. After many hours and digging and hacking, I stumbled upon this github repo. I forked it to make some changes of my own to make this work for me. This post is written in MDX (MD + JSX).

It allows me to write in MD with the added benefit of having JSX/TSX when needed. In addition, I can create very specific customizations that are unique to me and my site. More on that later.

You can find the code for this blog here. Feel free to copy it, fork it or do whatever you like with it.