title: "Example Blog Post" date: "2025-05-15" slug: "example-blog-post" published: true layout: "blog-post" tags:

• markdown
• express
• nodejs
• blog-engine
• handlebars
• xss
• gray-matter
• postcss
• code-highlighting

• web-development

Welcome to My Blog

This post serves as a fixture to validate Markdown parsing and layout rendering. It's written in standard .md, parsed via marked, sanitized for XSS, and passed through a custom layout engine using express-handlebars.

Markdown Features

I chose to use markdown because it's:

• Easy to write
• Converts to clean HTML
• Supports bold, italic, and inline code

Engine Details

• Markdown rendered at request time with gray-matter + marked
• HTML output is sanitized via xss-clean middleware
• Layouts are precompiled for performance and cached in memory
• Styling is minimal, composed at build with postcss-import

Code Example

Code blocks are highlighted using native <pre><code> tags. Language inference and highlighting are not handled by JavaScript on the client—deliberate decision to avoid runtime bloat.

console.log("Hello, world!");