Hello World, Again!

Merry X'mas!

For more than 10 years, this site has been running as a self-hosted Wordpress instance with a custom theme, hosted on DigitalOcean. While there haven't been any major issues, I had always wanted something much more lightweight and customizable as a web dev, and also something that is preferably free :p.

There were many options, but I eventually settled for Nextra (opens in a new tab), a lightweight content-focused framework for Next.js that allows you to write in MDX (a mix of Markdown and JSX) and hosting it off Vercel (opens in a new tab)'s Hobby tier (opens in a new tab).

Nextra (Next.js Framework)

I did find that I have been writing a bit more JSX (with styled-jsx (opens in a new tab)) than Markdown while setting up some pages, as I have come to realize that the layouts you can achieve with Markdown alone is pretty limited - you can basically only create a single column of left-aligned content.

Writing posts (which would probably be the main use case subsequently) with Markdown is certainly quicker though, so using Nextra with MDX support seems to provide a good balance of flexibility so far.

Hosting on Vercel

A bandwidth limit of 100GB/month for the Hobby tier seems reasonable for a personal static site. I must say I like the built-in CI/CD integration too. Once you connect your git repository for your Next.js project, every push to master deploys the app in a couple of seconds - nothing not to love so far!