Blog Tech, Again

I usually tell people not to write posts that say “Hey, I’m blogging again!”.

Reasons:

• Newcomers probably don’t care or have context
• It’s going to look weird if that’s the only post

Hopefully that’s not the case two months from now! Instead of a post about blogging again, I’m going to cover some of the blog tech I used to get this thing running again.

I finally settled on this chronoblog theme and Gatsby to support this. Years ago (8!) I wrote a post about blog tech - it’s quite outdated. Since then, I went through a Jekyll and then Hugo phase (blog repo here).

Ultimately, the feature set I want is:

• A simple, clean, text focused theme. No bells or whistles.
• Reasonable search and filtering by tags. I want it to be easy to find my own posts.

I did end up editing post metadata in all my old posts, mostly cleaning up excessive tag usage. Now I’m finally writing a post again!

One hang up I’m struggling with is whether I should outline/write in org mode or jump straight into markdown blog files… For now I’ve identified that as a sneaky, writer’s-blocky excuse.

To update the years-old blog-tech post and get my own notes recorded, here’s a list of blog engines in consideration when I made this switch:

• A new Hugo Theme - Pure or Pulp - I liked these, but a few errors and extra pages/features weren’t easily excised, and I wasn’t satisfied.
• A brief start with eleventy, which I’d never heard of.
• Eleventy has a nice list of competitors if you’re looking for others.

I decided to try out Gatsby, which is a NodeJS + graphQL-based platform. I feared that tool chain might be overkill for getting a simple blog done (the graphQL in particular led to some inscrutible errors), but the theme provided very simple pieces and introduced me to the .mdx extension, i.e. .jsx + .md. It turned out to be simple to make a few tweaks of my own, which is a good sign - maybe I’ll be able to maintain this with little effort!

After all these years, I’m still just pushing the build to S3. After configuring gatsby-cli and aws-cli, that just means:

$ gatsby build

$ aws s3 sync public/ s3://russmatney.com

Now, isn’t that nice?