Onward and Upward
- Published on
Hello from 37,000 ft! I'm flying back to the States after a trip to Copenhagen and Sicily. With an 11-hour flight ahead of me, now is as good a time as any to start blogging again... and I might as well rebuild VanceTran.com while we're here.
Reading through and migrating my old blog posts, it is mildly amusing to see how far I've come. At the same time, the content is a bit sparse. So, as part of the site revamp, I'll be backdating some posts that detail my electronics projects and adventures in self-hosting - currently they just live in markdown notes and photo albums. If I find the time, I'll add notes on my recent trip and previous trips as well.
Previously, this site was built on Gatsby, but it seems it has fallen out of favor lately. I decided on trying out Next.js this time around since it has wide industry adoption, makes use of the React and TypeScript that I know and love, and can scale to any kind of project. Posts will be written in MDX, the React-enhanced version of Markdown, and I'll still publish on Netlify like the previous version. I'm heartened to see that Next.js has great support on their platform.
I was a little on the fence on whether to start with a bare-bones Next.js blog template or go with something more full featured like Timothy Lin's tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog. I ended up going with the latter since it has a lot of the features I want out of the box, like dark mode, responsive design, and nice layout options. It also has a good set of components that I can use to build out the site. This should get me up and running with something presentable quickly, and I can always customize it later.
To wrap it up, the goal is to keep this site is to be a mix of personal blog and portfolio. I want to share my thoughts on tech, document my projects, and showcase my work. I hope to post more frequently this time around, and I think the Next.js + MDX combo will make it easier to do so.