I’ve been using contentlayer with this new NextJS blog/digital-garden/website/thing and so far I’m really liking it. Content Layer is basically a way of reading MD and MDX files and then turning them into JSON that JavaScript can then process. In addition to reading markdown into data, Content Layer also does a few other things that other libraries aren’t offering. With Content Layer I can not only turn MD into data, but it also creates TypeScript typing for that data and allows you to extrapolate and generate metadata on the fly to go with that JSONified markdown.

For example, on this blog I currently have two “types” of content; BlogPost and BookReview. A BlogPost is any file found in my sylvan/content/blog directory and it will be accessible from the /blog/ endpoint. Likewise BookReview content is found in sylvan/content/book. Each content type has it’s own iterate that you can import to loop/map/find/etc. over and is also located in the allDocuments iterator.

Where Content Layer is going to really shine is when I figure out how to hook sylvan up to my knowledgebase and then exclude some files from being generated into content — for example maybe I don’t want to import my work-related documents into my personal website.

In the future I’d like to look into what I can do with MDX files. If I continue on with using Obsidian as a CMS, I will probably not have too much use for MDX files, but maybe for very technical or JavaScript/React related files the benefits of MDX will outweight the announce of using MDX in Obsidian. But then again, I am not entirely sold on Obsidian and am looking at getting planwarrioir, which would remove my current big use of Obsidian — the Day Planner plugin.