// the find
daneden/daneden.me
🏡 This is my website. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Daniel Eden's personal website — a Next.js 15 blog and portfolio with 15 years of posts on design systems, typography, and frontend craft. The content is more interesting than the code; the repo exists mainly as a reference implementation for anyone building a similar MDX-based Next.js site.
The metadata architecture is clean: posts are registered in a central posts.json rather than scattered frontmatter, which makes listing, RSS, and OG image generation straightforward without reaching for a CMS. Dynamic OG image generation per post via a route handler is well-executed and avoids the third-party image service trap. The use of Next.js route groups for layout branching (root vs. branches) keeps the homepage layout completely separate from blog/portfolio layouts without hacks. Font loading is done right — self-hosted woff2 files with next/font, no Google Fonts CDN dependency.
This is a personal site, not a library or framework — there's nothing here that generalizes or that you'd extract and reuse. The directory structure has a minor awkwardness: blog content lives in two places (app/(branches)/blog/ for routing and content/YYYY/ for the actual MDX), which isn't obvious and trips up anyone trying to add a post by reading the tree alone. The GraphQL client utility suggests a third-party data dependency (likely GitHub) baked into the portfolio section, but there's no documentation on what API key or token that requires to run locally. Stars are mostly people bookmarking a design-focused developer's work, not endorsing a reusable project.