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Hello Again! I'm still here! As can tend to happen, I lost track of time and this site fell very out of date. Since then, I have been hard at work building things and expanding my knowledge. Time to get back to it!
Stack Evaluation
I evaluated building my required features in 3 major framework approaches:
I have wanted to use MDX for site for a while as in my opinion, it represents the best of both worlds: The ease of writing Markdown with the power of React components/ JSX. This combo is the perfect match for a development blog like mine.
Each of these frameworks supports MDX and more importantly the new MDX 2.0 syntax that represents the future of the format.
Next App Dir
Next was where I started my exploration, as the Next App Router supporting React Server Components is the newest shiny option on the block. I made a bit of progress but found I would need to roll my own scripts to work with MDX frontmatter/ metadata, something that would be a fun challenge but would clearly distract me from the goal of getting the site up quickly. So elsewhere I looked!
Next Pages Dir
I have spent a lot of time using the Next.js Pages router and its very well understood by the community. For me, the marks against it came as I feel its counter-productive to invest in a pattern that has been officially designated as end of life. Onward to the next!
Gatsby
The previous version of the site also utilized Gatsby and while its not as currently popular, I previously found the GraphQL layer indispensable when it came to building pages the way you want, sourced from any content.
The Build
The Stack:
- React 18.2
- Gatsby 5.11
- Raw CSS + BEM
- React Spring 9.7
- Typescript 5.0
That last point was a must: as an engineer working with increasingly complex apps I have heard the strictly typed gospel: Praise Types. For my uses here Typescript works great and allows me a greater guarantee of safety.
Analytics
In research and knowing the reckoning that has recently occurred for GA4 (and reading years of privacy concerns), I knew I had to try something different. I have had some luck with adding a indiehacker tag onto searches (much as one used to be able to add reddit to improve result quality prior to SEO marketers figuring this method out) which led me to this discussion. Many suggestions exist in there but for my traffic i felt anything close to $9 a month too expensive (Fathom, Plausible or Overtracking) or two free options mentioned in a comment added 2 days before my search (thanks ) mentioning Umami and UserMaven. I picked Umami based of its design (These things matter!) and was able to implement it super fast with a simple script tag.
Here we are on the new https://graydonpleasants.com! I strove to upgrade every area of the site and to work to fully utilize the benefits of MDX 2.0. I was able to come up with an Easy way to draft MDX articles using Github issues and will likely product a few more articles on how I built it.