Nextjs for a blog ?

Nextjs is going to be faster (and with free hosting by Vercel). It comes with server-side rendering built-in, and last time I checked, Ghost and WP does not (given it's PHP and scripted on the fly). As for "overkill," I have to disagree there as well -- both Ghost and WP have a ton of features that one simply doesn't need for a basic, self-hosted blog.

Take a look at the example projects here: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples. I'd go with the 'blog-starter' project that simply uses markdown files.

Note: These "blogs" are really not equivalent. Ghost is a beautifully simple blog, and for the non-programmer that can read documentation, you'll up and running quickly. WP has been around a long time and has tons of extensions that help the novice or non-programmer hack something together for their particular needs, and even customize much of the website. Nextjs doesn't really do any of this, and it not a blog at all. It's more of an opinionated react framework; you'll want to have plenty of experience with javascript, react, html and css before jumping in here.

In the last 3 months, I have stood up 3 new blogs with next.js. 2 were for sass companies and 1 is my personal blog at https://johnny.am

If you're familiar with next.js, then getting a blog going with next.js is really fast and you get the extra benefit of being able to customize it as much as you want to meet specific needs. In the past, I've found that having to customize something on existing blog platforms ends up costing you a ton of time and workaround, and the skills you learn aren't really transferrable. I'm personally not looking to be a wordpress expert for example.

For the two company blogs, the content is stored in strapi as markdown. For my personal blog, I store the blogs locally on the file system as MDX because i wanted the ability to embed working examples in my code instead of having to embed codesandbox or similar. On my personal blog, I do use strapi to collect user feedback/suggestions and other blog elements though. All three are hosted on Vercel.

So far, it's worked great and hasn't been much work. The biggest issue I've had is finding the time to actually write my blogs :) but at least I'm no longer limited to the blog engine I'm using. If I want to customize my blog to add interactive features, I can.

Simple CMS and WordPress is an interesting thing :)

But yes Nextjs is overkill for a basic landing page.

I see developers spending days/weeks coding when they should use something like Ghost or https://versoly.com/ (built by me so a little biased)

Next allows you to build out to static files instead of having to host a CMS like Ghost or WP. The dev experience is great and hosting is super easy (and free).

I think though, a lot of devs use their own blogs and portfolio sites to trial tools they are less familiar with because it's a safe place to practice. So often the choice of tool comes down to what they want to try rather than what's the best fit.

I am more comfortable working with Gatsby or Next but I think if you know your way around Wordpress then it's probably the easiest way to get going fast :)

Hi Abdellah, great to meet you! We took the time to create a blog post all about Next.js. We explore Next.js in more detail. We’ll talk about its architecture, types of applications you can build with it, share some code snippets, and explain why it’s the framework-of-choice for web development.
Check it out! - https://buttercms.com/blog/what-is-nextjs/

Let's look at how NextJS fits into the landscape of modern web development, and let's start at the beginning. The old way of developing websites was to generate a static HTML file for each page on your website (i.e. you would create, say, 'dogs.html' and your server would send that file whenever someone visited www.awesomedogs.com/dogs.html, very straight forward). Fast forward to now and the modern way to build front-ends is as a reactive single-page-application using frameworks like React, Vue, Mithril, Svelte etc. The great thing about these frameworks is that they can make your website feel super fast and responsive. The trick they use is to load a JS 'bundle' of the entire site into the browser (i.e. all the HTML and the CSS needed for every page), and the JS is able to render whatever page you want without having to reload the entire site (granted you might still need to download assets like text and images). There are two downsides to SPAs: 1) the bundles can be quite large (very inefficient if you only need to view one page on a large website), and 2) Google finds it difficult to crawl the content on SPAs because of the tricks they use. This is where NextJS comes in. NextJS basically tries to bridge the gap of giving you a super fast, responsive app experience but also sending you the page fully rendered (like an old school HTML web page). This makes Google happy (very important if you want your blog to be found) and also makes the reader happy because they don't have to wait for an entire bundle to download before your website can be displayed.