Its been almost 2 years since I had to change anything with my blog but unfortunately 2 years is a long time in web development, and my blog needed some love.

The Problem

So a few days ago I sat down to write a post on how we had just converted the entire backend of Markd over from Parse to GraphQL. I had recently upgraded my machine and thus I checked out the source from the repo and started to build.

To my incredible frustration, no matter what I did, I couldn't get the project t build. I spent 2 hours wrestling with npm, hexo, gulp, grunt, saas, node-gyp and windows native compilation. Eventually I threw my hands in the air and decided enough was enough. Im just going to rebuild the site myself so I know exactly how everything works.

Gatsby

I knew from my last migration that the key to a good performing blog was a staticly generated site. With that in mind I had heard much about GatsbyJs the static site generator with a large following and so I decided to give it a shot.

One of the awesome things about Gatsby is the documentation is very thorough and there are plenty of third party tutorials so I found it pretty easy to do just about everything that I needed to do.

I replicated pretty much everything from my old hexo-based blog and added a few other nice things.

I love it that my site is now all written in Typescript and React so I can very easily create custom components and things such as the Algolia powered search feature (see top right of this page).

Conclusion

There are definitely going to be some minor things not working so if you see something please do contact me and let me know.