Some years ago, I migrated this blog into Gridsome. It was a nice engine, providing everything I needed for this blog - except for the crucial aspect that it is no longer maintained, and the latest release came in 2020.
In other words, my blog would at one time or another be falling apart. I'd prefer it not to.
Many years in professional software development have thought me that regularly updating your dependencies tends to be really smart - and, on the opposite side, that not updating them would lead to big bulks of upgrading work.
Enough said, I needed to find an alternative. I'm primarily interested in - and good at - backend development, so I wasn't really eager to spend lots of time doing the frontend work. So I made a short list of required and desired features:
- based on React, as that's what I'm using at work and has been for some years, so it's familiar
- something that can be deployed to GitHub Pages, where my portfolio and blog lives
- a deal where everything is regularly updated
- using well-proven technology
- nice design
- not require lots of maintenance
So I started out trying Nextra, which seemed promising, so I converted all my blog posts and my portfolio into it. The design was nice and all. However, after I configured dependabot and got updates, I ran into errors with conflicting React versions, where the newest version of the Nextra framework didn't support the newest React. A red flag, so I decided to leave Nextra behind, and look for something purely based on Next.js and other popular, more generic frameworks.
Enter Nextfolio. It has a bit more code in the repo, but that means that I have control myself. Nextfolio is primarily based on React, Next.js and Tailwind, so the risk of being left behind is small.
It took me a while to make the static site generation work properly with the Nextfolio config, but I eventually made it. Now, the only thing that annoys me is that the link to the RSS feed has changed, and I haven't figured out how to override it.