Over the coming weeks I’ll be working through the process of rebuilding my blog using Gatsby as the front end.
Why am I doing this? Well, I’m pretty bad about keeping a full CMS up to date when it’s just for my personal site. I’m busy, and struggle to keep up.
Why Gatsby? I have to admit, Gatsby is a bit daunting to me at the moment. There are simpler static site generators I could be using. So, why did I choose Gatsby? I went this route because while, for the moment, I’ll be using locally stored, static markdown files for the content on the site eventually I’d like to move to a new, simple decoupled Drupal backend powered by Drupal’s excellent JSON:API. The path from here to there is a bit long, though, so I’m starting simple.
Wait, you just said maintaining a CMS was too much work. Yep, it is - when the CMS is accessible to the world and contains everything from the frontend to the backend of the site. With a decoupled architecture, I can keep a lean, mean Drupal configuration behind the scenes. That site will be far easier to maintain and keep up to date.
In the meantime, I’ll use Gatsby’s local static content store to track my progress. I chose to start with the gatsby-starter-blog project.