How I made my blog

When I decided to start blogging, I knew that I wanted to build the site myself. I chose to use the Gatsby framework as I had been learning JavaScript for a while and I already had a project built in React. Gatsby is an open source framework that helps you create a static website easily and quickly. The Gatsby docs have a tutorial that can get you started with a blog site within minutes. The Gatsby Starters Library has templates for e-commerce, portfolio, blog, and other sites.

To make the site, I followed this YouTube tutorial closely. The creator, Andrew Mead, has more courses on the JavaScript ecosystem on his blog. I also had a lot of fun with the whole open source ecosystem around Gatsby, including the many plugins.

Challenges ⛰️

There were many things I found difficult about the project.

• I struggled with the conceptual difference between components and pages. This meant I had code on my pages that should have been in components.
• I used CSS modules, but there were still too many styles in the global scope. Remembering to write classNames in the JSX way was another headache.
• Basically anything that didn’t follow the tutorial exactly. This taught me a lesson about understanding the code (and not simply copying it) before I tried to build on or debug it.

Things I like ❤️

• I’m still pleased with how the site looks and performs. I like the minimal design, and Gatsby’s speed makes browsing pleasingly snappy.
• It’s easy to add posts, and markdown is a distraction-free and intuitive writing experience.
• It works well with Netlify, which is a super-efficient and easy-to-use hosting platform.

Things I want to add 🚧

There are, of course, things I want to add to or improve about the site.

• Security vulnerabilities are the most urgent. One drawback of the framework is that it has a bunch of dependencies that have to be maintained and, in some cases, replaced.
• I would like to create a reusable sidebar component to abstract some of the site’s duplicated code.
• It would be great to have pagination on the blog index page and set a maximum number of listings per page.

I enjoyed developing with Gatsby, and I would make another site with the framework. I hope that I’ll have enough time soon to make the improvements I listed above. If you have any questions about the process, let me know on Twitter at @MollyBloom1989

Good luck with your projects!