About this blog

A quick note about this site and the blog as I work to expand the functionality and style it to my satisfaction. When I decided to create this website the choice of platform was fairly clear: I was going to use Gatsby for the site because it’s a fast static site generator built with Node and React. It didn’t hurt that I was already familiar with Gatsby and had experience working with it.

Once the decision to use Gatsby was made it was onto selecting a headless CMS to use. Since I was going to host the blog on the excellent Netlify platform, I wanted to try out the Netlify CMS. It’s very cool, using plain Markdown for content and the content is stored in a GIT repository. In my case, the code is stored along with the Gatsby source code for the site.

With the basics sorted out, I headed over to pick a Gatsby starter template to use. Unfortunately, there aren’t many using Netlify CMS and even less that eschew Flow or Typescript. I also knew I wanted to use Styled Components to style the pages and Storybook for developing and viewing components in isolation. After some searching, I decided to use Marko Radak’s awesome Gatsby + Storybook starter. This gave me Storybook + Styled Components and didn’t burden me with things I didn’t need.

Since the Gatsby starter I used was fairly basic, I added in the code to integrate Netlify CMS to the site. I used Alexander Shelepenok’s Gatsby Lumen Starter as a rough guide for my site and went from there. Some of the features I wanted to add in were time required to read the posts (similar to Medium), a tag cloud that could be used to filter articles by tags and a fast text search to search the articles. The first two are done and I will be working to integrate Algolia search with the site.

Please have patience as I’m continuously working to improve this site and will be adding a few more interesting features as I go along. Hopefully I will move to adding real content to the site in the next couple of weeks.