Writing without a CMS
This blog used to be a Supabase table with a broken article page. Here's why I tore that out for plain MDX files.
For a while, every post on this site lived as a row in a writing table, edited through an admin panel at /dashboard/writing. It worked, technically — but I never once opened that panel to actually write anything.
The problem with a CMS for a blog of one
A CMS earns its keep when multiple people need to publish without touching code, or when non-technical editors need a safe, constrained interface. Neither applies here. I'm the only author, I'm comfortable in a text editor, and the extra layer — auth, a database table, a form UI, image upload plumbing — was pure overhead for a blog that had two posts.
If you're the only person who will ever publish, a CMS is solving a problem you don't have yet.
What replaced it
Posts are now .mdx files in content/writing/, each with a small frontmatter block:
---
title: "Post title"
excerpt: "One or two sentences for the card and social preview."
tags: ["Tag One", "Tag Two"]
coverImage: "/images/my-cover.jpg"
publishedAt: "2026-08-01"
trending: true
---
Regular Markdown content, plus a few custom components:
<Video src="/videos/demo.mp4" caption="Optional caption" />
<YouTube id="dQw4w9WgXcQ" />
<Callout type="warning">Something worth flagging.</Callout>lib/writing.ts reads that directory at request time, parses the frontmatter with gray-matter, and estimates reading time from the word count if I don't set one manually. next-mdx-remote/rsc compiles the body to React on the server, with syntax highlighting via rehype-pretty-code and heading anchors via rehype-slug.
What I got out of it
- No login, no admin UI, no database round-trip — publishing a post is
git add,git commit, deploy. - Real version history — every edit is a commit, not an overwritten row.
- A working article page — the old CMS version never actually had one; clicking a post 404'd. This one has a table of contents, a reading-progress bar, syntax-highlighted code, and a share bar with proper Open Graph previews.
The Work and Projects sections stay on the Supabase-backed dashboard — those genuinely change often enough, and independently enough of a code deploy, to justify it. Writing didn't.