Moving on to Great Gatsby

Why I moved to Gatsby

Gatsby has gained a lot of popularity recently. It is a framework for creating static web sites that are well performing and optimized. It is not one of its kind. There are lot of others too.
It is sort of a reinvented way to create static web sites. You could argue that this would be sort of over engineering though. Static sites, all you need is html and css. Probably some javascript, right?

Maybe so.

Actually, I of course love Gatsby. Coding with React and using GraphQL to create static web sites. Yes!! Are you kidding me!! Hype train here I come!! Community is pretty awesome too and threshold to become a contributor is really low.

Bye ghost

When I started my not-very-frequent blogging, I wanted to use ghost. Also open source platform, made with nodeJS. But what i chose was sort of a packaged application version, hosting provider Namecheap’s ghost machine. And it really did not work very well. And my guess is tha support stuff there is super overworked all the time (although always polite and helpful), so it had some challenges.

How I moved to gatsby

There really is not much to it in how. Documentation is excellent and there an plenty of good examples, starters and themes laying around the internet. For you to pick. For freeee.

You can start here

Or here

Or grab a starter from community here.

Mdx

Your content can come from pretty much anywhere. From variety of CMSs to your own filesystem. Blog is pretty naturally created by markdown, but gatsby blog can go further than that and use MDX. Combination of markdown and react JSX.

Don’t know what the hell I’m talking about? See for your self

Netlify

Hosting can be also in literally everywhere. You can use a standard hosting provider and ftp your bundled html, css and js files up there. Or you can use something super neat like Netlify which does all the building and deploying and getting and installing free SSL certificate for you. Little things like that!

Just connect you github repo to your site and you are golden! Pushing to master === publishing.

Joel’s digital gardening

I recently watched a talk between few content creators, here. I liked a lot about these ideas about expressing yourself. Digital gardening. And this, “You don’t need a publish button”. Do. Not. Overthink.

If process is smooth end easy enough, I hope this lowers the bar for someone like me too.

Aaand just my development todos.

Never mind these. But I kept list of todos as a blog post when converting my ghost blog to gatsby and you know.. why not let this one also go online. In the spirit of gardening. The are couple on items still left.

• dark mode
• images for tag pages, like I had in my ghost blog.
• write the compulsory ‘I also moved to Gatsby’ blog post :)

And quouting Joel again, “Nobody cares. Nobody’s seen anything. It’s fine.”