2026-07-07 · meta / nextjs

How this blog works

Markdown files in a folder, zero database, everything rendered at build time. Notes on the setup and how to publish a post.

This site now has a blog. The whole engine is a folder of markdown files that Next.js turns into static pages at build time. No CMS, no database, no admin panel. Publishing means committing a file.

Publishing a post

Drop a markdown file into content/posts/. The filename becomes the URL, so content/posts/my-post.md ships as /blog/my-post. Each file starts with a small frontmatter block:

---
title: My post
date: 2026-07-07
summary: One line shown on the index, in the RSS feed, and as the OG description.
tags: hardware, fpv
draft: true
---

Body starts here.

draft: true keeps a post visible in next dev but out of production builds, the RSS feed, and the sitemap. Delete the line when it is ready. Tags are comma separated and purely cosmetic for now.

Images live in public/blog/ and are referenced the normal markdown way:

![Bench photo](/blog/bench.jpg)

What the build does

Every surface is statically generated:

/blog lists the posts newest first
/blog/<slug> renders the markdown with syntax highlighting (shiki, build time only, zero client JS)
/blog/feed.xml is a plain RSS 2.0 feed
/sitemap.xml covers the whole site including posts

Code blocks get highlighted from the fence language:

const posts = fs.readdirSync("content/posts").filter((f) => f.endsWith(".md"));

Each post page also carries BlogPosting JSON-LD and per-post OpenGraph tags, in keeping with the rest of the site being readable by agents as much as by people.

That is the whole system. The interesting posts come next.