My personal website built with GatsbyJS.
Tech Used
-
GatsbyJS
- JavaScript
- React
- Node.JS
- SCSS (SASS CSS pre-processor)
- GitHub Pages (hosting, for now)
Background
I wanted to create a personal blog / website just for fun. I figured I could write about some of the programming stuff I do and also have a good place to store pieces of code which I can refer back to in the future. I explored using something like Wordpress but it was my preference to retain full control of the site and to not have to rely on a third-party content management system.
Initially I thought about using .NET Core and MVC/Razor Pages, but that has the issue of requiring server hosting which would involve some sort of cost and a more complex hosting setup. I then came across static site generators, which generate static web pages from a set of template files. There are heaps of options out there like Hugo and Jekyll, but I decided to go for GatsbyJS since it was based on React (something I wanted to get more familiar with) and I had read a lot of positive things about it. The documentation was also thorough and very easy to read.
I bought the domain for iameric.net in March 2020, and started building the website. I worked on it on-and-off for quite (it was not live during this time) a while until in late 2020 I committed to working on it a bit more consistently. In early 2021 I finally got the site live.