Not Another Blog.
Yes, that title is supposed to be ironic. Or is that sarcastic? At any rate it was time to throw a bit of fun into the mix. My other project has come to a dead stop and while I await some kind of help on Stack Overflow or perhaps some epiphany on my part, I’ve decided to start moving my online portfolio and blog from Jekyll to Gatsby. The main reason being that it’ll keep me in ReactJS and that’s what I want to focus on for the front end side of development. After watching the video by Scott Nonnenberg on Gatsby and seeing that it was basically a React/Webpack version of Jekyll. Well yeah what more could you want?
Don’t get me wrong I think Jekyll is great. There wasn’t anything like it in terms of ease of getting a small project off the ground very quickly. Especially when pairing it with gh-pages it was a small business’s or developer’s dream. One huge thing is lacking though. Hot reload. The only reason my GitHub profile has as many commits as it does is because I have to make a commit for every little cosmetic change that I want to make to my site. That includes fixing spelling errors. The amount of stupid commit comments I’ve had to come up with is beyond me. So the fact that with Gatsby I hit save and I can see that change instantly is just so valueable. Let’s face it, no matter how great something is in the web world after a couple of years something else comes along and does it better. This is one of those times and that’s no knock on Jekyll whatsoever. But better is better.
Would You Like Some ReactJS With That?
So I know that React is the new shiney thing and sometimes those things can turn out to be not as bright and shiney as we all expected(Angular 1 I’m looking at you). However this time I think it’s a safe bet to assume that React will only improve on it’s awesomeness. Personally I love it so far. I love the fact that it’s only the view in MCV. I love that I can use it with Python as my back end. I also love the that you can use the already VERY high quality sytled components from projects like react-toolbox and react-materialize. If you haven’t caught on by now I just love what React is AND what it does. The idea of having only the parts of your page that need updating be the only parts that change is just brilliant. Then you throw in Webpack and suddenly you’re creating cutting edge code compliant web sites for all major platforms(well not really but pretty much), responsively. That’s insanely powerful stuff.
After using a ReactJS, Webpack & PostCSS setup I really don’t want to use any other kind. Once you get the nice and shiney things you want to keep them. Trust me I know how painful setting up Webpack can be but once you do have it working with PostCSS it really is revolutionary in my opinion. It’s not a huge revolution but it IS a massive step in getting the front end of web development channeled into one aspect instead of fractured into the seemingly infinite options we face currently today. Honestly I think that’s the biggest problem in web development and anything that can simplify making choices and hopefully somewhat homogenize things is welcomed to me. So in that spirit I decided to make this move. Since, again, it’ll keep me using React when I’m making changes to my portfolio side or the blog side.
Buy the ticket. Take the ride...
After I get things hammered out the way I like them I’ll be loading it up to Letlify first and if all goes well I’ll likely just replace my current gh-pages site with this Gatsby version. Then I can use the Letlify page for something else. All in all I’m liking making progress on things. When I hit a wall with one project I’ll just move over to the next until I resolve whatever issue is stopping me. I really don’t like doing that but when I hit this kind of a wall there’s not much choice. So I’m very happy I found Gatsby when I did…
Brandon