Back in May I took a stab at getting my blog going but it never got off the ground. It’s never seemed like a priority but as I sit here on a rainy day it seems like a good time to dig in.
Like a lot of people I’ve been really liking React. I thought of using WordPress as a back end via the REST API with React on the front end but really wanted to keep the speed an ease of my previous static setup. An entire CMS seemed like overkill for a place where I would be the only author and user.
So I’ve been on the hunt for a way to write in markdown, build the front end with React, serve the site statically and manage the entire thing on GitHub.
I pondered tweaking an existing static site generator to generate JSON, rather than HTML, so I could deploy both the back end and front end statically. I’ve had some experience with Jekyll but wanted to stick with writing JavaScript, not Ruby. Initially I found Phenomic but it was framework agnostic and seemed to be more of (a cool) side project than something serious. After a long search I found Gatsby.
Gatsby is a modern website generator based on the React with great docs, solid example, an very active main developer and a good community.
It sounded like exactly what I was looking for, without any hacking. I downloaded Gatsby and was up and running with the starter theme quickly. I was able to write my own theme using React components and even learn some GraphQL along the way. If you are looking for something similar give it a shot - I’m glad I did.
If you’re interested in viewing the source code for this site you can find it on GitHub at ataylorme/ataylor.me-gatsby.