What's the Best Blog Site for AI Developers?

Overview

I'm a university student in Korea who wants to become an MLE. I've been continuously feeling the importance of blogging for developers, so I tried to create my own blog. I've already tried Tistory, Naver Blog, Velog, and Disquiet. However, since I also dream of settling in the US, I wanted to start with an international platform rather than a Korean one. I found that Medium, Hashnode, Ghost, and Dev.to are popular. But after trying them all, none of them had everything I wanted.

1. Required Features

1.1. Native LaTeX Support, Code Box Support, Easy and Free Editing

When studying AI, formulas and code appear constantly. Most platforms don't support these natively, so you have to attach them as images or use strange methods like additional plugins.

Also, I realized that I'm very familiar with the Notion editor and thought it would be great if I could write with Notion. There were BlogPro, Feather, Super, Notaku, and Bullet, but they were difficult to use for the reasons below.

1.2. Completely Free

Most sites that create blogs from Notion required subscription fees. As a student, it was burdensome to pay more than $10 every month.

1.3. Automatic Table of Contents Management and Category Classification

I wanted to write systematically, where clicking on the table of contents would navigate to that position, and I could infinitely subdivide posts in a folder-like structure. However, it was difficult to find platforms that support this.

1.4. Multi-language Support

I want to write blogs in English, but it's difficult to write properly, so I thought I could write in Korean and have an LLM translate it. But there was nothing that properly supported this. All of them only allowed creating blogs in one language, and you needed a completely new account to create in another language.

1.5. Multiple Editors Working Simultaneously

I was running a study group and we were operating a blog together. Hashnode supported this, but it was hard to find support elsewhere.

2. Noxionite

So I decided to create it myself. I found something called nextjs-notion-starter-kit

GitHubGitHub - transitive-bullshit/nextjs-notion-starter-kit: Deploy your own Notion-powered website in minutes with Next.js and Vercel.

GitHub - transitive-bullshit/nextjs-notion-starter-kit: Deploy your own Notion-powered website in minutes with Next.js and Vercel.

Deploy your own Notion-powered website in minutes with Next.js and Vercel. - transitive-bullshit/nextjs-notion-starter-kit

. It was a kit that automatically turned Notion pages into blog-like sites. Unfortunately, it didn't have automatic table of contents management and category classification features, and could only be viewed in Notion's basic gallery view format.

The core differentiator of Noxionite is that the following Type, Parent, Children, Language items were added to the Database. From Type, categories and posts are separated and can be managed hierarchically between parent and child.

Public

✅ Type

Title

✅ Parent

✅ Children

✅ Language

Slug

3. What I Felt While Developing

I made everything with vibe coding and it took about 90 days. This seems to be the first time I've properly created a product like this, and there were many times when things didn't work well, so I shouted "Should I quit?" dozens of times. But if I persevered, the problems were eventually solved. Of course, then comes another moment when I think about quitting again. I think it took too much time, so I want to finish quickly and try running a proper blog. I hope it will be of great help to people looking for blogs with similar features to what I wanted.

The features that took the longest time were the graph view and social image generator. For the graph view, I used [library name], but when trying to use it in Next.js, it didn't work properly due to ref timing issues. Also, the most difficult feature was automatically zooming to nodes when hovering over Side nav items or navigating pages. This was because communication between libraries didn't work properly. I spent over a week on this feature alone. Instead of making everything at once, I started by creating debugging tools and solved it step by step using a divide and conquer approach.

The social image generator also took a very long time because I tried to make it too pretty. Instead of being created statically, I wanted to dynamically create it by bringing all the page's title, tags, author, date, and breadcrumb while making it glassmorphic, so I learned that next/og couldn't be used. So I implemented it by using Puppeteer to display HTML in a virtual browser and take screenshots. I also made it automatically manage social images dynamically. However, this Puppeteer had dependency issues with Vercel, which took a very long time to resolve.

I'm thinking about implementing comment and view count features in the future. These features can't be done with Notion alone and require an external DB, so it will probably become more complex.