Lately I’ve been thinking that I wanted to redesign my blog. I wasn’t happy with the previous result, aesthetically. The simple solution to this would have been to just change the CSS. The blog engine (Jekyll) was just fine. It was doing everything I wanted. But I didn’t do that.
Why? Mostly because I am a frontend developer that works a lot with React. It’s within my comfort zone to work with it and I wanted to practice. Gatsby is brining in technologies like React, styled components, grapnel and a lot more. This is an excellent opportunity to work with all of these new technologies and get familiar.
From all of the new things I worked with I fell in loved with styled components. It’s combining the power of custom components, that React brings, along with fully isolated styles. As a result you have reusable, styled components. They can be as customised as you want and you won’t find yourself playing with CSS that is conflicting with other styles in various pages. When it comes to Graphql I didn’t work enough with it to form an opinion.
Do you need all of that? By all means, no. You really don’t need any of that for a simple personal blog. But if you want a more complicated site, that serves content and can utilise your teams knowledge of React then by all means go for it. Also, if you are a developer that wants to know more about React, Graphql, styled components and a lot more then go for it. It’s excellent.
And about hosting? It can’t get more simple than Netlify). I literally just made an account, pointed it to my Github repo and all was deployed. It took me 5 minutes and it’s free. Really, try it. Also setting up my custom domain and SSL encryption was even faster. I’m a bit fun.
Finally I want to thank my friend Ivan Marinkovic for the about me page and the super talented [Jacqueline](Jacqueline (@hellojcqln) on Twitter) for my logo. That’s all. Hope you enjoy it.