My OpenSource Blog that You Can Use Right Now

To read more articles like this, visit my blog

Creating my personal website was a long-time goal for me. Finally, I created my personal website with a technical blog which you can visit here.

Today, I have open-sourced the blog part of my personal website. I will show you how to use it and discuss some technical details.

What you will get?

Here is an example home page for the blog. The screenshot is taken from my personal website.

Live Demo

Or you can visit it yourself. ;)

Blog | Mohammad Faisal

Features

The blog is technically very rich. But the most important features are.

Markdown support for blogs
Syntax highlight with Prism.js
Github pages auto-deployment support
Google Analytics Integration
SEO setup
Tailwind CSS+Typography integration
Dark mode support with next-themes

Let’s make it your own

Let’s see how you can use it. Below is the repository that you will need.

GitHub - Mohammad-Faisal/nextjs-tailwindcss-beautiful-blog-template: NextJS+TailwindCSS Blog…

If you prefer the video version I have made a youtube video for this as well.

https://youtu.be/lEljvKRtU4c

Or else you can follow the instructions below.

You will go there and click the Use this template button to make it your own

This will automatically kick off an Action that will build the website and add to a new branch named gh-pages .

Publish

From the settings panel on your repository you will go to the pages section and select the source as gh-pages .

You will see the live URL there.

Customize the content

If you want to customize it you can follow the Readme file on the repository. Basically, the idea is to edit the .env.local file to update the information with your own information.

Customize the Logo

Also inside the /public folder, there are images that you can customize to add your own flavor.

Technical Discussion

Now let’s talk about different technical aspects of the blog. If you prefer the video version you can watch the following video that I made.

https://youtu.be/CmDVpgh14k4

Or let’s talk a bit about them here as well

Markdown Support

I have used a library named gray-matter to load metadata from the markdown files.

You can add the meta data in the markdown file like the following

---

title: "Add Custom Fonts with NextJS"

description: "Create beautiful looking websites in minutes"

banner: "/images/posts/add-custom-fonts-to-nextjs/banner.jpeg"

tags: ["NextJS"]

date: 1 January 2022

published: true
---

And that package will automatically read the data and return an object for you. Here is how I used it

Code highlight

For Code highlighting, I am using Prism.js. First I am loading the styles file inside the _app.tsx file and inside the CodeBlock component, I am loading the styling that gives us beautiful syntax highlights.

Dark Mode

For dark mode, I am using next-themes It exports a function called setTheme which I am using inside the Header component to toggle the theme.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is very useful for any production application. You can just add your own google analytics key to the .env.local file and everything will work for you. You can check the below article for details

Add Google Analytics with NextJS | Mohammad Faisal

SEO Setup

We are using next-seo package for adding all the required tags for the site. Here are the details

Improve SEO in NextJS | Mohammad Faisal

Also, we are generating the sitemap.xml file for our blogs as well. You can check the following article for that.

Create Sitemap in NextJS | Mohammad Faisal

Tailwind Typography

I really really liked tailwind typography. It made my life so much easier as I am not that skilled in UI design. It works like magic and makes everything really beautiful. Here is a video where I described how I used it.

Conclusion

There you go. Please star the project if you liked it. Also, feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn or my personal website if you have any questions or confusion.

Have a great day! :D

Blog