How to Build Your Own Blog with Next.js and MDX

Modern blogging has come a long way from its humble origins. Today, developers and technical writers have a wide range of powerful tools and frameworks at their disposal for creating rich, interactive blogs. Two technologies that have gained popularity recently are Next.js, a React-based web development framework, and MDX, a format that combines Markdown with JSX.

In this guide, we‘ll walk through the process of building a fully-featured blog using Next.js and MDX from start to finish. By the end, you‘ll have a fast, SEO-optimized blog that‘s a joy to write for and a pleasure for readers to browse. Let‘s get started!

Why Build a Blog with Next.js?

Before we dive into the tutorial, let‘s quickly review what Next.js is and why it‘s a great fit for building blogs:

  • Performance – Next.js offers features like server-side rendering, route prefetching, and code splitting to optimize performance. This results in fast page loads and a smooth user experience.

  • Developer Experience – As a React framework, Next offers a component-based architecture, declarative routing, and helpful tooling to streamline development. Automatic code splitting, filesystem routing, and hot reloading all help boost productivity.

  • Full-Stack Capabilities – Next.js can run both client-side and server-side JavaScript code. This allows you to easily add backend functionality like fetching data from databases or submitting forms without needing a separate server.

  • Deployment – Next offers one-command deployment to hosting providers like Vercel or Netlify. Your blog can be up and running on the web in minutes.

What is MDX?

MDX is a special flavor of Markdown that allows you to use JSX inline. In other words, you can import and use React components right inside your Markdown content.

This is huge for blogging, since it means you can create highly customized posts with interactive elements like charts, image carousels, or embedded videos, while still retaining the simplicity of writing in plain text. MDX has the best of both worlds.

Some other benefits of MDX include:

  • Familiarity – Markdown is a popular and easy-to-learn syntax for writing web content. MDX builds on that foundation.

  • Flexibility – By leveraging the full power of React components, MDX opens up many new possibilities for page layouts and interactivity compared to plain Markdown or HTML.

  • Reusability – Custom MDX components you create for one page can be reused across your entire blog or even in other projects.

Setting Up the Next.js Project

With the introductions out of the way, let‘s set up a new Next.js project for our blog. Make sure you have Node.js installed, then open your terminal and run:

npx create-next-app@latest my-blog
cd my-blog

This will bootstrap a new Next project in the my-blog directory and navigate you there. Follow the prompts to complete the setup.

Next, let‘s install the dependencies we‘ll need to work with MDX:

npm install gray-matter react-markdown 

gray-matter is a library that enables us to parse the YAML frontmatter metadata in our MDX files. react-markdown will handle converting the Markdown content to HTML for display in the browser.

Creating Content with MDX

Now let‘s write our first blog post using MDX! Create a new folder called posts in the root of your project. Inside it, add a file named post-1.mdx with the following content:

---
title: My First Blog Post
date: 2023-03-29
---

# Hello World!

My first post is written in **MDX**. I can use standard Markdown syntax to make my content more engaging.

I can also import and use React components inline:

<Button>Example Button</Button>

How cool is that?

At the top, we have a section of YAML frontmatter fenced in by — delimiters. We can put metadata about the post here, like the title and date. The rest of the file contains the content body in standard Markdown format.

The

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