
### First TIL

In working with the blog template for nextjs, I found a package that is so dumb-simple and I love it.

["gray-matter" on npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gray-matter) will parse a string (usually from a file), and turn some "front matter" into a plain old javascript object. The "front matter" can be yml, which is a bit lighter for typists to jam out quickly and allows for pairing your content with the structured data.

Very useful for the flat-file pattern that drives the blog you're reading right now!

```

  import matter from "gray-matter";

  const fullPath = join(directory, filename);
  const fileContents = fs.readFileSync(fullPath, "utf8");
  const { data, content } = matter(fileContents);

```

An example of a file with some structured data at the top in yml looks like this:

```
---
author:
  name: Teddy
  nickname: Bear

date: "2020-05-13T02:38:20.665Z"

---

Now this is the blog post! This is generally unstructured part of the
content that Gray Matter returns in { content }.
The part above this has "---" surrounding the structured part.
That's what Gray Matter will interpret for you, and return as { data }.
```

Since we're using yml here, you even get a cool structured object out of the "author" property, which returns from the parser as "data.author.name" and "data.author.nickname".


TIL: Gray Matter NPM


Thanks to Vercel.com for the host. They're doing excellent work.

Everything is statically generated; cribbing liberally from templates found here: [on github](https://github.com/zeit/next.js/tree/master/examples/blog-starter)

CMS and other backends seem to come and go, become more or less useful, but files are forever. As such, the new site has markdown posts with the hope that it can live for a while and keep life painless.


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TIL: Gray Matter NPM

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