Hello World: The Power of Markdown
Welcome to my first post on Jesus Blog!
When deciding how to build this blog, I wanted something fast, reliable, and completely within my control. While platforms like Medium and Substack are great for reach, you don't truly own your content.
By building a static blog powered by Next.js and Markdown, I get the best of both worlds:
- Performance: The site is statically generated at build time, meaning it's blazing fast.
- Simplicity: Writing in Markdown is frictionless. No clunky WYSIWYG editors, just plain text.
- Control: I host this on GitHub Pages for free, and my content lives in version control alongside the code.
The Stack
This blog uses:
- Next.js (App Router) for building the React framework.
- gray-matter for parsing frontmatter yaml.
- react-markdown and remark-gfm for rendering markdown natively in React with syntax highlighting.
- Vanilla CSS for a custom, tailored design.
Expect more technical insights soon!