steebe

A revamping of Steve Bass’ personal site, using Gatsby.

Release Notes

• 1.2.4: Cleaned up layout code; "soft-launch" of image components I don't hate a ton
• 1.2.3: Upgrading Gatsby and its peripherals
• 1.2.2: Adding updated to posts generated by MDX, and incorporating it into the post list logic and UI.
• 1.2.1: Fixing current page underline when on specific blog post. Adding page-specific titles.
• 1.2.0: Gatsby updates, Gatsby blog post, Tools section
• 1.1.3: Just bloggin'...
  • TODO: Improve the MDX processing component with anchoring and right-justified H2s
• 1.1.2: Font updates, and small changes.
  • Switched to [Web Safe Fonts](https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.php, to avoid Windows System Font issues
    • Kept monospace for pages
    • Changed to Georgia for blog posts, like the Apple bitch I am
  • Replaced an image & updated details in the About page
  • Learned CSS animations
• 1.1.1: "code changes," or not a true patch
  • Github Actions introduction to build & ship to master on push to dev, for Github Pages to then publish
  • https://github.com/enriikke/gatsby-gh-pages-action
• 1.1.0: Upgrading Gatsby to 5.5, and its supporting libraries accordingly
  • Upgrade guide
  • MDX Plugin Upgrade
  • Important hack for MDX
    • Additional workaround: {mdx.slug}.tsx --> {mdx.fields__slug}.tsx
• 1.0.0: Bootstrapping Gatsby
  • Basic tweaks to the default styles and mechanisms leveraged to get a site off the ground, in the way I want it to look

Diary

After many months since switching to Gatsby from a pure HTML site with a basic sibling Jekyll blog, I decided to keep my React chops up by giving Gatsby a try. I have been fortunate enough to have received some experience with Next.js. First on a side project, and then at work. My experience with Vercel's baby exposed me to the overarching JavaScript/TypeScript community more than I appreciated at the time, and I built a fairly foundational awareness of the alternative and up-and-coming frameworks and tools such as Gatsby and Svelte.

I was aware of Gatsby's potential. Raw power, fueled by GraphQL and a ferocious community. Power that promised a simple development experience for a complex and capable result: a static site on steroids.

Perhaps it was my stellar experience working with Next.js that got my hopes up for Gatsby, but I was shocked at a few attributes I noticed out of the gate:

• Complex
  • The docs to get things off the ground were (at the time, with Gatsby v4) absolutely massive. Nothing was simple.
• Scattered
  • For a framework that claims to offer so much, its functionality sure seemed to not be in one place. Plugins galore power this beast.
• Ever breaking
  • Each major release (and yes, I understand the point of marking a release as "major", thank you) contains massive breaking changes. The more plugins you use for functionality that's core to Gatsby, the longer it will take to address such changes.
• Not my job
  • I've encountered a few scenarios, mostly within the "getting started" guides or upgrade guides, in which the author of the guide offered no tangible understanding to a step or workaround, and rather linked to a library or listed steps provided by a community developer. Obviously, that's how the realm of programming gets things done in general (on top of existing solutions), it just feels lazy that a guide would be a place where an author cops out.

Technologies

• Gatsby
• Node.js