Next.js Iteration

March 01, 2022

3 min read

Once again, I've refactored my blog. I did this back in 2019 when I moved to GitHub Pages and Gatsby. I do this once in a while to teach myself something new. This time, I wanted to learn Next.js and Tailwind CSS. I gotta say, the DX of these tools is amazing! I don't really use Next to it's potential, right now it's really just spitting out some static HTML pages for my blog but it gives me a little more that I can do.

Architecture

I've also moved things around. With my last refactor, this site was just a collection of blog posts. Go to https://mitchellsimoens.com and you'd see a list of blog articles. These then pointed to URLs such as https://mitchellsimoens.com/2019/07/26/move-to-github-pages and you'd see that blog article. Now, I've nested all these blogs into the blog directory so that now I can start having other things in this site. What other things? Not sure.

Cloudflare

When I moved to GitHub Pages, I had Cloudflare's CDN in front of it. I've loved it. Recently, Cloudflare now has it's own Pages service. So now, I could move my static HTML pages under one provider. I can open PRs and Cloudflare Pages will stand up a full ephemeral environment automagically. In the PR, I get a nice little link to this environment to easily see. I say environment because they also have integration with Cloudflare Workers which I'm more and more a fan each time I use them.

Once again, the DX of Cloudflare Pages has been outstanding to work with. I'm starting to see why some companies focusing on DX are really succeeding in today's world.

Content Updates

With Gatsby, I could support different plugins to parse the Markdown that I write blogs with. With Next, I now can also use MDX. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of MDX but it's something I can easily support so... why not?

One thing I am a fan of, and GitHub recently started supported it too, is mermaid. So I support that within Markdown here too:

graph TD; A-->B; A-->C; B-->D; C-->D;

Future

Besides one day eventually refactoring everything into something new, I do plan on playing around more. I don't have specifics yet as my day job and being a father keep me very busy. But I look forward to doing more with Next, Tailwind and Cloudflare.

Written by Mitchell Simoens who is a long time nerd developing software and building computers and gadgets. Anything expressed on this website are Mitchell Simoens's alone and do not represent his employer.