This is the source code for my blog tsukie.com. Written in Next.js and hosted on Vercel. CMS is Notion. Theme by cruip.com.
Also, you can find the previous implementations for my blog here. This is the one written in Gatsby and here is the one written in Hexo.
The first time was with Hexo. This was kind of a dead tech, and customizing templates and data source getters on this was an absolute nightmare. After nearly 3 years of digging down this rabbit hole, I decided that I already had enough of this and started looking for alternatives.
The second time was with Gatsby. Working with trendy techs like React and GraphQL was cool at first. Eventually, the novelty wore off and I started hitting roadblocks again. Gatsby had quite a steep learning curve and lots of conventions I had to memorize. GraphQL kept adding complexities to what would rather be a very easy use case. In the end, I was kind of able to do everything I wanted to do with my blog, but the source code had already become a mess that was beyond curable severity.
The third time, after hearing a lot from my fellow indie community and seeing many successful examples, I decided to take the plunge and rebuild my blog with Next.js. I dropped support for multiple languages as well because blogging in languages other than English was like shouting into the void. I took the lean approach, scoped the MVP, built it, and put it on the web.
Compared to the above two techs, Next.js was so easy to learn, like just a few APIs were already enough to get started and become productive. I had complete autonomy on choosing how I wanted to organize resources or fetch data. No memorable roadblocks on the way, the whole development process was smooth sailing 👌. Deploying on Vercel was also brain-dead easy, just click a few buttons and it's done! Even a non-tech person could do that. Totally fell in love with Next.js just after a few coding sessions!
I think I have made my blog to the state where I want it to be, and from now on I'll concentrate more on actually writing articles. I have a lot of friends who enjoy coding their own blogs, only to leave them to settle in the dust later, and I don't want to walk that way 😅. With all the AI-assisted tools nowadays, writing actually becomes more engaging as well!
Please feel free to use this repo as a starting point for your personal blog 🤗. I'll continue to push updates and improvements, so please stay tuned!