Order has been restored

In my previous post, I mentioned the overly complicated setup of this website. Apart from using the Next.js to statically generate the contents of this website, and using Vercel to deploy it, I was using Prisimc to manage my content.

There was something about keeping the content with a third party service that was bothering me. Of course, there were some merits that I went with that setup in the first place i.e., I don't have to rely on the Github repo to write new posts. I can simply log into the Prismic dashboard and add a new post whenever it was convenient. Prismic also allows you to have a hook that gets initiated after you save and publish your content. So, no need to manually trigger the build on Vercel too.

But, I was relying on the third party. And after some deep digging, I found that there was no official way to export your content out of the service without being a paying member. Also there was no efficient way to import the content either without making a payment. Now, I completely get the idea of charging for the service but offering to create content on free plan but not offering to take your content on the same plan seemed sinister to me. You want me to come in, but you don't want me to get out? (ㆆ _ ㆆ)

Currently I was on a free plan because my blog is small and I was going to be the only sole contributor.

The other option was to self host a headless CMS and there are couple of good options out there too: Ghost and Strapi. But it seemed like an overkill (on an overkill — double overkill). So I settled on a simpler solution of having my writings inside the this GitHub repository and used remark and remark-html to render the markdown posts on the page. For now, I have simply added a symlink of my _posts folder inside the iA Writer and when I am done writing this post, I will push the new post as a commit. Like I used to earlier. For the past 3-4 years.

And so the order was restored again!