Just shipped the new Markdown content system for my digital garden. The whole thing is powered by gray-matter + remark + rehype, all statically rendered at build time. Zero client JS for content.
Next up: dark mode code blocks with Shiki. The rehype-pretty-code plugin looks promising.
Spent the afternoon exploring Shiki for syntax highlighting. Unlike Prism or Highlight.js, Shiki uses TextMate grammars — the same engine that powers VS Code's syntax highlighting.
It works at build time, so there's zero runtime JS. Perfect for a static blog.
Also discovered that rehype-pretty-code supports dual themes (light + dark) out of the box. No more ugly single-theme code blocks!
Weekend project: rebuilt the theme toggle with a dropdown menu instead of a cycling button. Three modes — Light, Dark, System — with a clean glass-morphism menu.
The tricky part was getting Tailwind CSS v4's class-based dark mode to work with next-themes. The fix was one line:
@variant dark (&:where(.dark, .dark *));
Sometimes the simplest solutions take the longest to find.
Digital garden is officially live.
It's not a blog — it's a collection of evolving notes, half-formed ideas, and things I'm learning. Some pages will grow over time, others might stay as seedlings.
Built with Next.js 15, deployed on Vercel, themed with Tailwind CSS v4.
Let's see where this goes.