Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash

When I decided to start writing this blog, I wanted to write it using MDX as the post format because I am a fan of Markdown (certainly less laborious than writing HTML directly) and because it would allow me to add dynamic elements written in react.js.

To quickly set up the blog I looked around what were the (not many) platforms ready to create static sites using MDX. Among all the possible ones I found mdx-go, a semi-ready solution for writing sites using MDX.

It was easy to set up the first version of the site and with minimal effort, I had everything I needed. Over time, however, I noticed that not everything was perfect: the resolution of the paths not always correct, the impossibility of making a dynamic listing, in addition to the fact that the framework seems not to be updated for a while.

Recently GitHub via dependabot intervened with a security update PR on a dependency, which “broke” mdx-go. The pages were available but the site appeared without style and basic structure.

Thanks to the experience gained with my other blog (Arché), I decided to migrate to next.js, which has official plugins for MDX. In just over an hour I was able to convert from the old to the new framework, and now I can also take advantage of the next.js integration on Netlify, where this site is hosted.

Lesson learned: Sometimes it is better to do a little more work and use a better known and supported platform than to have things ready and then find yourself limited or with many problems.