As part of launching zenbox.co I wanted to revamp this blog and try to blog more actively.

Since I've been messing around with React JS a lot lately, I was really excited to see gatsby-js as a way to literally bring those learnings to my blog. The gatsby starter blog was a great way to get started but I eventually hand-wrote everything to get it set up just how I'd like it. I also used the minima jekyll theme with a tiny bit of customization.

The commit history is a bit of a mess but you can see the source here: https://github.com/mericsson/mericsson.github.io/tree/staging

So far, the things I have liked about going with gatsby are:

  • Familiar react model
  • Overall snappy-ness of blog. 'Look ma, no more page loads!'

Tricky things I encountered:

  • GitHub pages requires personal hosted websites to be in 'master' branch. I had to modify the deploy script to handle that.

  • Links between blog posts do not leverage react-router so they result in a page load. I'd like to find a smart way to handle that.

  • Usual debate of inline css in react or not and using className everywhere. :)
  • Old examples of gatsby js in the gatsby README.md. It is relatively new technology and still rapidly iterating, so I expect more changes in the future.

Overall I'm happy and hope to follow the development of gatsby and use it in future static marketing websites I build out.