Improving My Next.js MDX Blog

I recently decided to redesign and revamp my site. I had a few main goals:

1. Easier content management for blog posts
2. Simplified, minimal design
3. Dark mode support

Simplified Design#

Before this redesign, I hand-rolled all of my components using styled-components. I was trying to maintain a consistent design, so I'd extract shared values out into a theme.

export const colors = {
  accent: '#ff5252',
  background: '#0a6159',
  border: '#dcdcdc',
  grey: {
      100: '#F5F7FA',
      200: '#E4E7EB',
      300: '#CBD2D9',
      400: '#9AA5B1',
      500: '#7B8794',
      600: '#616E7C',
      700: '#52606D',
      800: '#3E4C59',
      900: '#323F4B',
      1000: '#1F2933'
  },
  light: '#606060',
  text: '#101010'
};

export const spacing = {
  extrasmall: '0.5em',
  small: '1em'
  normal: '1.5em',
  large: '2em',
  extralarge: '2.5em',
};

Front-end tooling has rapidly progressed, and projects like styled-system and Theme UI make it easy to create components that easily adhere to your design system.

My site isn't anything crazy – mostly a few simple static pages and blog posts. While coding everything myself is a fun learning experience, there are plenty of component libraries that contain everything necessary to achieve the design I was aiming for. That's why I chose to adopt Chakra UI for my redesign.

• It uses styled-system under the hood, allowing me to use style props
• The theme is extendable, allowing me to change fonts and add icons easily
• It includes a great set of accessible components out of the box
• Works well with Next.js and supports dark mode

Here's a quick example of Chakra UI and styled-system. This is part of the source for the newsletter subscription at the bottom of this post.

<Box
  border="1px solid"
  borderColor="blue.200"
  bg="blue.50"
  borderRadius={4}
  padding={6}
  my={4}
>
  <Heading as="h5" size="lg" mb={2}>
    Subscribe to the newsletter
  </Heading>
  <Text>
    Get emails from me about web development, tech, and early access to new
    articles.
  </Text>
  <InputGroup size="md" mt={4}>
    <Input
      aria-label="Email for newsletter"
      placeholder="tim@apple.com"
      type="email"
    />
    <InputRightElement width="6.75rem">
      <Button fontWeight="bold" h="1.75rem" size="sm">
        Subscribe
      </Button>
    </InputRightElement>
  </InputGroup>
</Box>

Using style props, I'm able to easily style my components while pulling values directly from my design system. For example, mb (short for margin-bottom) of 2 will translate to 0.5rem or ~8px.

Improved Content Management#

I wanted to decrease the amount of friction it took to create new articles, as well as improve maintainability over time.

Previously, I maintained a JSON file containing all my articles.

export default [
  {
    date: 'February 24, 2020',
    slug: 'fetching-data-with-swr',
    title: 'Create a Dashboard with Next.js API Routes - Fetching Data with SWR'
  },
  {
    date: 'February 18, 2020',
    slug: 'google-analytics-api-nextjs',
    title: 'Create a Dashboard with Next.js API Routes - Google Analytics API'
  }
];

Then, I iterated over this list to display all articles when viewing leerob.io/blog. This approach worked, but it meant that I had two sources of truth.

Each .mdx blog post already contained this information, as well as other metadata passed to <Post />. Every time I added a new article, I had to change two places.

export const meta = {
  date: '2019-12-26',
  description: 'Highlights and reflections on 2019 and a look forward to 2020.',
  image: '/static/images/2019/banner.jpg',
  slug: '2019',
  title: '2019 Year in Review'
};

export default ({ children }) => <Post meta={meta}>{children}</Post>;

We can do better. I decided to use next-mdx-enhanced for front matter and layout support. Now, each .mdx file looks like this:

---
title: '2019 Year in Review'
publishedAt: '2019-12-26'
summary: 'Highlights and reflections on 2019 and a look forward to 2020.'
image: '/static/images/2019/banner.jpg'
---

You'll notice I removed slug. That's because I'm able to dynamically retrieve the value using next-mdx-enhanced inside the layout. Anything added to your front matter will be converted into an object and passed to the layout.

import React from 'react';

export default (frontMatter) => {
  return ({ children }) => {
    const slug = frontMatter.__resourcePath
      .replace('blog/', '')
      .replace('.mdx', '');

    return (
      <>
        <h1>{frontMatter.title}</h1>
        {children}
      </>
    );
  };
};

Thanks to babel-plugin-import-glob-array, I can make the file system the source of truth.

import { frontMatter as blogPosts } from './blog/**/*.mdx';

const Blog = () => (
    blogPosts.map((frontMatter) => (
        <BlogPost key={frontMatter.title} {...frontMatter} />
    ))}
);

MDX Plugins#

MDX uses remark and rehype under the hood and allows you to provide external plugins to hook into the compilation process. Some of the plugins I added were:

• remark-autolink-headings
• remark-slug
• remark-code-titles
• remark-capitalize

I also extended next-mdx-enhanced's front matter using reading-time. This gave me some features I had wanted.

• Hover over a heading and click on # to link directly to it.
• Use language:title to add titles to code snippets.
• Run title over headings to auto-capitalize based on The Chicago Manual of Style.
• Reading time of articles.

Better Syntax Highlighting#

Previously, I directly imported a prism.css theme alongside react-syntax-highlighter to provide syntax highlighting. This approach did not allow me to easily change styles based on the theme. Thus, I kept the code style always dark.

Instead, I switched to mdx-prism (which is a fork of @mapbox/rehype-prism) and created two prism themes for dark/light mode. mdx-prism also adds line highlighting capabilities 🎉

import { css } from '@emotion/core';
import { theme } from '@chakra-ui/core';

const prismBaseTheme = css`
  // Base styling
`;

export const prismLightTheme = css`
  // Light mode
`;

export const prismDarkTheme = css`
  // Dark mode
`;

const { colorMode } = useColorMode();
const prismTheme = colorMode === 'light' ? prismLightTheme : prismDarkTheme;

Summary#

Outside of my main goals, I was able to sneak in some other fun additions:

• Show view counts for all blog posts, dynamically pulled from Firebase
• Faster page load times
• Switched to Inter as my main font
• Fewer files, and a lot of deleted code!
• Switched to Next SEO instead of doing it manually

The best part? It's all open source 🚀