Hello 👋. Today i am excited to give my insights on how i built my blog and also share you some of the resources if i found it so helpful.
Lets jump into it stright away then.🏃♂️
While i was in search of some of the templates to start off with my blog site. I found this beautiful gatbsy starter template by Majid Hajian which was using typescript language. Coming from a .NET background i always like working with typescript as it is statically typed and it brings familiar OOP constructs to JavaScript . Hence i have decided to go with the same. You can find the starter template here.
Gatsby is a static site generator that uses React. Everything is configured out of the box including React, Webpack, Prettier and more.
If you haven’t used React before there is a learning curve but there are plenty of well written tutorials that makes learning React very accessible. Not to mention the official React documentation is very well written.
If you want to know more about Gatsby and interested in building something , You can follow the documentation here
When i was working on my portfolio website, I have used GitHub pages because it’s free and fairly easy to set up. Although I still think GitHub pages is a great tool, Netlify takes the process one step further to make the developer experience even more efficient.
Once you’ve hooked up netlify to your repo, each push to your GitHub repository, automatically builds your website, according to the static site generator you’re using, and deploys it to production.
Although I currently only use Netlify for static site hosting, it supports cloud functions, domain management (with SSL), form submissions, a/b testing and more.
Besides features, Netlify’s web interface is clean and easy to use. Coming from using AWS a lot in past projects, the difference is night and day. While AWS has it’s advantages being highly configurable, the large portion of us developers are unlikely to use this functionality. When I first used S3 or Lambda (Amazon’s static file and cloud function services) I would spend a considerable amount of time looking up Amazon’s difficult and sometimes out of date documentation. There is a whole lot of unneeded complexity and Amazon jargon when using AWS which is why Netlify is a breath of fresh air. It’s one of those services that just works.
The best part about Netlify is that it’s free. If you’re in a large team or need more resources for cloud functions, form submissions and more they do have paid options. If you plan on building a small blog like me, it’s unlikely you’ll need to pay for anything.
Gatsby and Netlify are the easiest way to build and publish a static website.
If you would like an example of how to build a blog using Gatsby, the code for my blog is available on .GitHub
I hope you found this article useful. If it did please help others spreading the word.😊 For any suggestions or feeedbacks 👉 Contact