My blog is straightforward. Technically speaking, I use the minimum amount of CSS (70 bytes minified) and JavaScript (none, actually) to define a simple layout. I’m currently using Hugo as the underlying framework to generate a static site and GitHub Pages for hosting.
I’m getting to a point where I want to take my blog to the next level. I’ve been increasingly interested in problem-solving and want to create a specific section to focus on programming challenges. I also want to start a new personal challenge of trying out different technologies and writing a brief description of the overall experience and how to take the first steps. I would also publish on GitHub any code resulting from these experiences.
But this will involve a significant amount of changes in the current layout of the blog. At this point, I’m wondering if I should keep going with Hugo or take the opportunity and move to another framework. Gatsby has been under my radar for quite some time now and brings several cool things to the table:
- Could be the perfect excuse to dig into React finally
- It would give me more flexibility regarding defining templates for specific sections of the blog
- These templates would be used for any site I build in the future, keeping the same look and feel in everything I create
- The performance metrics on sites created with Gatsby are very impressive.
Here are some of the changes I want to push forward:
- New logo (yes, I’m unleashing the hidden designer in me)
- Create sections for different topics to better organize the current single list of posts
- Add labels to add a more fine-grained high-level description of the content on posts
- Add a treemap to display posts by year
- Add the publish date to each post and the list of updates with the corresponding dates
- Integrate my introduction page into the blog as a sort of “About Me” page.
The next steps will be:
- Slowly change the current template to increasingly match what I envision to be the future layout for the blog
- Create a small prototype with Gatsby to better grasp the learning curve in both bootstrapping a new website with this framework and porting the current layout to React.
Oh, and keep writing!