The last few weeks have been weird. I was in PDX for a company off-site, where I got COVID (for the fourth time). I quarantined in a hotel until I was negative, then flew home and quarantined for a few more days in my home.
During this, I started playing around with the idea of rewriting my blog. I had tried this once about a year ago, and I found my partial rewrite did not work. I tried picking up the git branch I had started, but it was a mess, and COVID brain kept me from making any real progress.
A week after this, I went to a wedding in Bermuda for my friend Matt.
It was a lovely time, but in my free time, I started researching how to best rewrite a markdown / MDX blog. During this research I learned about two new things: contentlayer and NextJS 13's app router.
contentlayer is super cool. Basically it precompiles your content into Typescript so it can be imported and typed. It's a neat mix of static site builder while still separating the content and presentation of the content.
App Router is slightly less exciting, but it was interesting to learn how Zeit was redesigning the developer experience of NextJS after all of this time.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but I have no doubt there are a few bugs (I thought I made the rss feed identical, but I apparently did not, for example). If you come across something missing, please file a bug at https://github.com/icco/writing/issues or email me at nat@natwelch.com
Thanks!
/Nat