Hello AI Router: Why I Rebuilt My Blog From My Own Template

The backstory

My previous blog was Notion-driven: I wrote in Notion, a renderer published it, and themes were a config option away. It worked — until it didn't. Content was locked behind someone else's API, page performance depended on a third-party client, and every deep customization turned into a fork I had to maintain.

So I rebuilt the site on top of my own SaaS template. Same Next.js App Router foundation I use for products, but pointed at writing instead of selling.

What I kept from the template

• The content pipeline. Posts live as MDX files in the repo, and the admin console can also manage database-backed posts with a translation queue. Both merge into one blog index.
• The theme system. Design tokens live in CSS custom properties per theme, and blocks/layouts/pages resolve per theme with a default fallback. Switching looks is an env var, not a rewrite.
• The boring-but-critical parts. i18n routing, sitemap with hreflang alternates, RSS, auth, RBAC, payments if I ever need them — all already wired.

What changed

The landing page is now a blog: a short hero, the latest posts, and a subscribe box. Navigation is Home, Blog, Categories, Archive, About. No funnels, no tool pages — just writing.

Why own the pipeline

Writing is a long game. The tooling should get out of the way and survive decades of churn. Owning the stack means:

1. Content is plain files in git — portable, greppable, diffable.
2. Performance is my responsibility, not a vendor's queue.
3. Features land when I need them, not when a platform ships them.

This is post number one. Let's see where it goes.