In 2017, I was hosting my ‘static’ web-profile on Wordpress. We could say that that was an overkill. What’s more, was I still in the LAMP stack age while others thrived in Git-Based content using Jekyll etc.. like in Github pages?
“Wordpress never gets old!” is how I convince myself. With business thriving for theme creators in Envato, see this and this, among other platforms, I bet a lot of guys agree with me. Plus it still serves for its purpose: providing an easy-to-use CMS that’s widely supported by hosting companies; has a myriad of customizable themes and talent to do that for you.
Back to the chronicle, I bought stanmd.pro for the Wordpress-powered web-profile and we were live!! for more than at least one year, It’s still indexed by Google 😅.
Then
Here are the images of my immediate former blog:
Home page
Blog
Technologies
Here I used Netlify and NuxtJS: A VueJS framework. VueJS, I’ve always been a fan. I used this template by andreliem who runs VueJS radar. There are a good number of valuable resources on VueJS there
Experience
The Blogging experience was great: just push a new markdown file as a post to github and the site is built and hosted by Netlify. I went ahead and integrated a Buy Me Coffee button by kofi surprise me 😉 and a Meet Me button by Vyte.
I like the fact that in each page I could add unique meta-tags. That’s good for SEO
Downsides
Just one really. I could not get the slugs to work. Well we can agree that I did not take time to make them work and opted to source an alternative… A good segue into the now new stanmd.tk
Now
You’ve seen it now that you are here:
Again, a template as you can see that this repo is a fork from this guy’s project. I would like to thank Teddy for letting me know of this alternative after I shared my frustrations with the former 😁.
Technologies
The template/ starter uses Gatsby which is a free and open source framework based on React. So we are using React now 🙌 Slugs work out of the box, of course! Pagination, disqus - for commenting, beautiful typography among other neat features make it standout over its close competitor another gatsby starter by LekoArts. LekoArts’s gatsby starter portfolio is amazing. Both use Netlify CMS still built on React 🤔 which is amazing once configured (which is not difficult at all) PS: This a nice read on VueJS and Netlify CMS
Experience
My goal in revamping was to get my writing groove back on. Could you imagine that I have written three articles in two days as soon as I got this set up? 💪
Now besides writing in markdown, I can write in Markdown or Rich Text (with preview) on the browser, via the admin page. I enabled Google OAuth for the Netlify Identity so I can pretty much blog anywhere. My updates become commits on Github with my Github account. Sweet!
I also like the draft option.
I had not written React for some time, so writing this component TK was nostalgic 😄. I was intrigued by the use of snapshot for tests. When did that come out?!
In short this brings me the full CMS experience with very little input on my part.
Downsides
None for now! I’ll mention updates I would like to see or rather that I can push to the project’s repo as a PR. The blog could benefit from adding these features:
- Minutes to read
- Dark mode (maybe 🤷🏾♂️😁)
- Scheduled toggle from draft to live (I understand JAM stack, so this could be a stretch)
JAMStack
Building blogs and apps on the aforementioned Nuxt and Gatsby lie in the broader spectrum of built on JAMStack. I am glad that with this setup I am following JAMstack’s best practices. I consider it worth diving into.
In conclusion, working on this has been amazing. I have learnt a ton! We all have our preferences; others don’t like blogging while others love, love doing it! This guy prefers using Vim and a script to push to live 😎. I feel that this revamp is an upgrade. Till the next one 🥂.