Gatsby Begins

And so I tried out Gatsby and promptly decided to turn my WordPress based blog into a static generated website. And to be honest, this is not the first time.

My personal website has gone through a couple of stack changes:

• 2008: Custom CMS (PHP)
• 2014: Jeckyll - static website, hosted on GitHub pages
• 2017: WordPress - self-hosted, Docker-based
• 2019: Gatsby - static website, hosted on Netlify

Motivations

Well… in a word… memory.

I used to host my WordPress blog as a Docker project on a small DigitalOcean droplet and while trying to deploy some new stuff using Captain Rover I was running out of available memory. WordPress had to go.

On top of that, I was also tired of WordPress. I recently read a nice blog post about leveraging Medium to bring traffic to your owned content using the import story function.

Long story short WordPress was performing horribly when it comes to Medium’s import function, and I didn’t really want to spend too much reformatting each article.

First Impressions

Gatsby is heavily based on React and GraphQL, two tools that I like very much. It feels quite easy to jump into a theme that I don’t know and tweak it to my liking.

The official documentation sucks just a little. I felt confused about moving my first steps. After a while, I found a beginner tutorial that covers most of the steps that you might need to get to a decent blog product. It wasn’t easy to find, at least for me!

The starters are a very nice feature. I could choose a theme that I like, and extend it. More or less the way I am used to doing with Docker.

What to say about the resulting performances? I ran a lighthouse test and got 100% on everything :-)

A Lot of Work Ahead

As with every change, now I must re-import all my old posts. Damn it!

Luckily most of them were already written in Markdown so it should be quite of a quick effort.