⁉️ How is this site constructed?

Next.js

This isn't my first time using Next.js, but it's my first time using it from scratch. I have had experience in the past with Next.js by contributing to an existing project as part of my work at Oqton.

ChatGPT and Claude helped me set some of this up, but the documentation and steps are fairly logical and straight forward. Choosing the correct router was something that I didn't expect to require as much consideration.

Vercel

I've never used Vercel before. Previously, the other websites I've made have been a smattering of things like Django hosted with njinx and gnunicorn on basic ubuntu servers, but whilst chatting to a colleague about advice for setting up sites like this in a more cost effective way (Digital Ocean is perhaps just a little overkill/expensive for this kind of project), he recommended Vercel.

The setup with Vercel was remarkable straight forward. Linking it with my GitHub and pointing the DNS of a previously owned domain was also trivially easy as I've had a bunch of experience with DNS in the past.

VSCode

I've used other IDE's in the past, but i've just gotten into the groove with VSCode these days. It's heavily integrated into the workflow at Oqton and it's more effort to use anything else. Dark theme all the way of course.

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🤔 Challenges

Markdown

In my mind, I thought it would be simple for me to be able to write these thoughts in a basic Markdown file, and have the thoughts page list the files in that directory, and then render them using standard Markdown styling. Turns out, it was more complicated than imagined. At the time of writing this thought, i'm using something called next_mdx_remote which async renders the mdx file client-side. I think this is the right approach for now, and expect I can expand the capability with custom components down the line, but for now, it appears to be working...