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Multi-week series · Week 6 of 8 · ~2 hours of class + lab
By the end of class your site has /blog with at least one published post — your own first-person recap of weeks 1–5 — plus an RSS feed at /feed.xml that validates clean against the W3C feed validator.

Reference-template prompting

Point Cursor at the Vercel Blog Starter — AI consumes its patterns rather than re-inventing from scratch.

MDX posts

Markdown plus React components. Syntax highlighting via rehype-pretty-code, OG metadata, reading time.

A valid RSS feed

/feed.xml generated from MDX at build time, with autodiscovery <link> in the head. Subscribers welcome.

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Learning objectives

By the end of this session, you should be able to:
  • Graft a real blog onto an existing Next.js app by describing the feature to Cursor and pointing it at a reference template — without ever hand-editing route files.
  • Write and publish your first MDX post so that it renders on your live site with proper typography, a cover image, and a working permalink.
  • Ship a valid RSS feed that a feed reader can subscribe to, because shipping a blog without an RSS feed is shipping half a blog.

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Core topics

  • MDX = Markdown + React components. Why this is the right content format for a developer blog.
  • Routing: how app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx maps to a URL.
  • Metadata patterns: frontmatter, OG images, canonical URLs, reading time.
  • RSS in 2026: still the cleanest way to be findable and syndicated.
  • The “reference-template” prompt pattern: teaching Cursor from an existing good example instead of re-inventing from scratch.

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Tools introduced this week

ToolRole this week
Vercel Blog StarterThe reference template we point Cursor at
MDXYour post files — Markdown + React components
remark-gfm + rehype-pretty-codeSyntax-highlighted code blocks in posts
reading-time + gray-matterFrontmatter + reading-time utilities
feed (npm)Generates valid RSS 2.0 / Atom feeds at build time
Prerequisites: Complete Week 5 — Image Uploads with Vercel Blob first. The blog grafts onto your existing portfolio repo.

Download Week 6 PDF

Full lecture · 656 KB — Session plan, hands-on lab steps, MDX + RSS troubleshooting.

Continue to Week 7

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