We're back baby! New year, new blog updates 🚀

I haven’t blogged once since my last post ✨ That new blog smell ✨ about a year ago, where I similarly talked about updates I’d made to my personal site. Well, we’re back again with almost the exact same thing, but the 2025 edition!

This time I’ve not made quite as many changes. My site still runs on Next.js but a lot of other things have changed. I previously commented how the performance of Next.js wasn’t quite as good as SSGs like Gatsby but since then I’ve learned that this was due to a personal skill issue, not an artefact of the framework itself. I was previously using the Outstatic framework to manage my blog posts, which worked pretty well (and had a nice UI) but was a bit of a PITA to integrate nicely.

I’ve since switched to Nextra, which seems a lot more promising and more importantly, easy to integrate while remaining performant. Everything is pre-generated at build time, and blog posts are written in MDX, which opens a huge amount of possibilities.

I was also previously hosting this site on Cloudflare Pages via next-on-pages - because that was the only real option for running Next.js on Cloudflare. Since then, OpenNext was released which enables running Next.js on the Workers ecosystem as well as other non-Vercel platforms. OpenNext has been gaining in popularity recently following its first major (1.x.x) release (okay admittedly it’s a beta, but still!). Running Next.js on the Workers ecosystem is an absolute dream, and I’m not just saying that to be a corporate simp.

How does Next on Workers compare to Vercel? 

I deployed a copy of this site to Vercel to measure the performance and compare that to the active deployment on Workers, and honestly there’s not really that much in it. Both sites load within ~350ms, which is to be expected considering I’m in a central metro area with a beefy computer and fast internet. I imagine for bigger projects or applications with users in a lot of varied, distinct geographies there might be a bit more of a difference - but for my use case it doesn’t really matter too much. I think the biggest deciding factor is the ecosystem. I’ve been a fan of Vercel’s platform for a while, but their pricing is pretty whack and that doesn’t give me a huge amount of confidence to deploy anything other than small hobby projects.