Hello World!
January 30, 2020
This Blog
I've long thought about having a personal blog, but it's always been something I've put off.
I think a lot of the standard tools that I've seen other people use (like Wordpress, Medium, or Svbtle) just never looked great to me. I wouldn't say I have a strong aesthetic, but I knew I needed something different than what came out of the box.
I recently spent a couple of nights putting together my home page, and this blog felt like a natural extension of that work.
The Inspiration
I really really loved Daniel Gross's homepage. This project started out by my blatantly copying his template 🙃
My friend Paul also has a beautiful personal website which I used as inspiration!
The Stack
Here are the tools I used to build the site!
- 🚀 Netlify for hosting
- 📐 GatsbyJS for Frontend Framework
- 🏖 TailwindCSS for styling
- 👨💻 Markdown with Remark & Rehype for rendering
I'll definitely be writing a longer post on the decisions I made to get to these and all the work that went into building this site. Also big shout out to Adam Wathan and Steve Schroeger for Refactoring UI. I really learned a lot from this - and hopefully these tips helped make this site look good!
Adding Dynamic Blog Pages in Gatsby
It's unbelievable how convenient the Gatsby documentation is. There was a guide for exactly what I wanted to do. I know making a blog is a common use case, but it's so rare to be able to follow a tutorial / documentation with no edits whatsoever.
The Plan
I know resolutions are hard to keep. That said, I'm hoping to post at least one long-form piece of content here every month going forward.
Here's to a great 2020 and beyond!
Jeff