GatsbyJS: Using a New Static Site-Builder

I had been searching for a new static-site generator for some time. I was delving into Grav, which is more of a flat-file CMS than a static-site generator and is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I couldn't make Grav work for my needs.

One of the things that I'd like to do is provide my source-code and source-documents in the same git repo so that I can push text updates and site updates (UI, a11y, themes, etc) via git.

A month or so ago, I was listening to the Changelog Podcast episode #306, and it was all about Gatsby as a static-site generator built with React. Things were clicking into place and I knew that I just had to try it out.

When I was home, I ran through the excellently written tutorial, then started building a site using the "Getting Started" documentation. I had fleshed a few ideas in this new site, like using accesssability-first, using a strict linter, and a few other minor details. Then Gatsby v2 went from being beta to release-candidate, so I decided to jump ship and start fresh as a v2 site.

Migrating my old site's content to Gatsby was fairly easy since the old content was already in Markdown with a yaml header. I just needed to reformat my dates-of-publication to use a consistent timestamp style and a few other minor details.

This initial view of the site is very plain, but I plan to update and upgrade fairly regularly. What you see is not its final form in my head. More to come!

I expect that I'll be writing more about Gatsby and about the migration.