mapping VS gray-matter

Strava worked with Mapbox when they were switching over. I don't know what exactly the deal was, but Mapbox employees added a bunch of missing stuff to OSM based on Strava data analysis.

https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/issues/114

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

In this article we walk you through the process of creating a simple blog app using the popular React framework NextJS, gray-matter and next-mdx-remote.

In order to get post information (such as author, title, date, etc.) from our HTML without having them be apart of our rendered post we need a way to parse YAML front matter, this is where gray-matter comes in hand.

It’s actually not part of the CommonMark spec, so you’ll often need a 3rd party library to parse it out on top of your Markdown parser. In JavaScript we use gray-matter which converts frontmatter into a JS object we can more easily use.

Over the past few weeks, I mostly wrote on how to template a Node.js application with EJS using Express. Then, I wrote an article showing how to create a Markdown blog in Node.js using EJS, Express, gray-matter and markdown-it. Today, I'll combine those tutorials to turn the Markdown blog, from the last tutorial, into a simple SSG.

gray-matter, to parse the front matter from the Markdown files

Luckily for us, there is a fantastic NPM package that can help us with this. Let’s install it.

gray-matter: Converts a string with front-matter to object.

Load the frontmatter - gray-matter

I began building a blog application for a site that I may or may not finish. The bulk of the project is based on the blog-starter-typescript example in the NextJs GitHub repo. Their example loads markdown files from a folder in the root directory and uses remark and gray-matter to convert the markdown into html and to get file metadata. The example code for these function is located in their lib folder as api.ts and markdownToHtml.ts.