Hello Gatsby - Part 1

It Sufficed

Up until today, my blog has been running on Jekyll and hosted on Github pages, which sufficied. But thats just the thing, it sufficed. Over the past half a year I've not blogged at all, and even before then it was sporadic. Now that is mostly down to me, I've not had the enthusiasm to do it, and looking back now one of the reasons why I think that was the case was because I've never really been happy with my blog platform.

I find Jekyll to be somewhat clunky. I need to install Ruby (I've never coded in Ruby, so this is my only use case for it), I need to pull down the repo. Run a couple of commands (which I always need to go to the Jekyll homepage to remember what they are). Write the post in markdown. And then commit & push to the repo.

From there github pages would take care of the rest, but getting there, for me, always felt a bit like climbing through a bush full of nettles. Sure I could get to the other side if I really wanted to, but the thought of climbing through that bush always seems to put me off.

(The Ruby CLI commands, by the way)

gem install bundler jekyll
jekyll new my-awesome-site
cd my-awesome-site
bundle exec jekyll serve

It just didn't suffice

There were a couple of things which just out right annoyed me.

The first being the theme of the blog. I was using the bog standard, out the box theme which came with the blog, and I tried on multiple occasions to change the theme, but for whatever reason I could not get it to work.

The second being embedded tweets. This didn't work natively out of the box, so I tried a plugin. Which I couldn't get working.

Now I know these are going to be down to me - if I put the effort in to try and fix them then I know I would have been able to achieve the blog I wanted. But effort. I'm not a Ruby dev. My desire for learning lays in other areas of tech. Learning Ruby (and whatever else I need for getting the blog how I want it) was not and is not something which I wanted to spend time doing.

As such the blog kinda worked, but I was never happy with it.

I nearly got ghosted

On several occasions I've considered using ghost.io, it looks to be a nice clean platform with an easy to use panel for creating content, but due to my historic poor performance of blogging and the subscription cost ($36/month billed monthly) it was something which I didn't want to commit to financially. At least at the moment. I just can't justify the cost for the gain I would get out of it

The Great Gatsby

I've come across Gatsby before, one of my friends uses it for his blog, and it sounds like a great platform. It uses technology that I am already familiar with, such as React, and technology that I am not yet familiar with but want to learn, such as GraphQL.

It has a CMS, Netlify, for creating and publishing content, so I no longer need to climb through the nettle bush but can instead take the path.

Thus far all I have done is create a blog, migrated a couple of old blog posts, and logged into Netlify to write this blog. And thus far I really enjoy what I see.

Heres to more of the same. Gatsby, I have great expectations from you.