The New Gatsby Blog

Why Migrate at all?

Why go with a new blogging platform? My old website since the dawn of time has been in WordPress. This is complete overkill and added overhead to keep it up to date and pay for hosting. Nor do I care to dive into the structure for templating out WordPress themes. WordPress by comparison is also slow. Enter Gatsby.

I have used my share of static site generators in the past, Jekyll, Hugo and the list goes on. Templating languages such as Jade, Handlebars, Moustache, etc. Again all have a lot of unnecessary bulk for what I’m trying to accomplish. With Gatsby I can have my awesome reusable components in the same React and JSX format I use everyday. It also allows for different data sources. So I could use WordPress as my CMS but all the rendering and speed bonuses of a statically generated site. Still for my uses the WYSIWG is more than I need so I have gone with a markdown solution for my data set and to store my content.

To encourage actually authoring content for this blog I need the flexibility to author posts whenever an idea comes up. As my current note taking application Bear is already using markdown. I can very easily start a post from my phone and have it’s syncing capabilities to my desktop app. Then it’s seamless to copy over the markdown from my editor to my code editor of choice.

New Technologies

And added benefit to using Gatsby is that it offers a new project in which I can stretch my legs with some technologies that don’t make sense to flow into my day job right now. With the Gatsby stater and implementation I have chosen I can get my hands on with several things I have yet to touch in any great depth such as: GraphQL, TypeScript and Styled Components. From a philosophical level have been opposed to the mixing of styles and application logic and believe it clutters two aspects of our code which are what I’ve believed to be better kept separate. This gives me the opportunity to at least give it a college try and either open myself up to a new approach or validate my current opinion.