Trying interactive blog posts: MDX components and React inside the feed
Spent the day pushing one RAG post from plain markdown toward an interactive, animated layout, fighting performance issues with tabs and animations inside the post body.
A focused day on one question: can a blog post be more than static text?
tgmarinho-ai-website
The goal was to take an existing RAG overview post and make it visually richer: animated charts, tabbed sections, the kind of interactive layout that explains a concept better than a wall of prose. The reference was a couple of standalone HTML mockups I had built, plus the site's own design system.
The core tension was the content format. Today the post body is plain markdown, so JSX and React components do not run inside it. I looked at moving interactive posts to MDX, which Velite supports, and set up a separate content/interactive-posts/ area to test that path without touching the main markdown pipeline.
It did not come for free. Once the tabs and animations were live inside the post, the page got slow and even froze when interacting with the tabs. So most of the day was the honest part of the work: building the interactive version, watching it stall, and deciding whether the complexity is worth it for a handful of posts that actually need it.
I also generated a contextual cover image for the interactive RAG post.
Interactivity is easy to want and expensive to keep fast, and the real decision is which posts earn that cost.