December 30, 2019
Starting off 2020 with a refresh of my personal site. Overall, the design is mostly the same. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination but the site is, hopefully, a good representation of my work and my personality.
This is a development blog after all, so let's talk stack. I had used Gatsby on a bunch of side projects and my old portfolio used the original version of Gatsby. I wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest. My old blog also existed on a separate repo and was an old Jekyll setup, which I wasn't a huge fan of. Customizing it was a bit of a pain and I didn't like managing two separate ecosystems.
So, I wanted to shift everything onto Gatsby and maintain the easy authoring experience for me as writing my posts in Markdown can be done ANYWHERE–especially with GitHub's UI. I started off with a fantastic starter project by Robin Wieruch - gatsby-mdx-blog-starter. From there, I ported over everything from my old site–including a few custom gatsby-node-plugin
scripts to push Projects to their own custom page templates.
Apart from a few bumps in the road with merging two conflicting createNode
and createPage
scripts, everything went fairly smoothly. Now, everything is running on the latest and greatest.
As I say every year, I wanted to make this easier to manage with the goal of publishing content more often. Let's hope I stick to my goal this year.