codemusings();

Hello World

August 31, 2019

Honestly I have been saying I would revamp my site for a while. Now that I have been doing more creative coding I wanted a place to showcase my sketches and host breakdowns of new software technologies. I decided to jump into the deep end and look into Gatsby. While Jekyll is the most commonly used static site generator, it’s Ruby roots weren’t too appetizing. I know nothing about Ruby and I didn’t intend to pick it up.

I went with Gatbsy due to its Node and NPM roots. I’m at least reasonably familiar with javascript and NPM so it wasn’t too hard to get going. I decided to go with an mdx variant of the default blog starter. mdx allows me to write all of my posts in Markdown while still getting the benefits of React plugin integration. Seems like a great workflow and it doesn’t require an external CMS.

I was able to find a scaffold for the mdx blog here . This got me up and running but I wanted more functionality including:

• Extra static pages
• A simple navigation bar
• Dynamic tags page
• Dynamic tags landing pages
• unpublished blog post support
• p5.js embedding
• pico-8 embedding

I spent the last day or so fighting with react, graphql and Gatsby but as of now I have a set of basic functionality that I am pretty happy with. Getting tags working probably took the longest time and I needed a combination of of a personal blog and gatsby documentation to get these features integrated. I would say that it did feel a little like I was juggling 100 plates to get things working. It really feels like all this stuff is duct taped together by too many libraries. To top it all off I ran into an image rendering bug while getting this post prepared… Luckily I was able to fix it quickly.

Despite that, out with the old and in with the new. I look forward to being more active on the web and sharing more of the cool stuff I have been working on in my free time.

• Yacht Rock →