Website Refresh
A new website for new things and why I built a new site, again.
- Gatsby static site generator.
- Netlify continuous integration and hosting.
- NetlifyCMS as the CMS.
- Tachyons css toolkit. Atomic css ftw.
The code for this site lives at https://github.com/bigredwill/wsimons.com
The Stack
Github Pages and Jekyll served me well for many years. Yet, I dreamt (literally dreamt) of a serverless CMS solution that utilized a git repository as a database. I even began experimenting with an implementation myself. Little did I know that this would soon be reality.
During my travels I brainstormed about the next iteration of my personal site would be. I wanted a CMS system, but didn't want to manage a server. I liked writing with markdown, and liked the component-based approach to UI of React. Enter the JAM Stack.
Gatsby, with React as the 'templating' system, allows me to quickly iterate upon the site. I went from zero to what you see now in a few afternoons.
Netlify acts a CDN and allows me to deploy development branches and to production at the push of a git commit.
NetlifyCMS literally made my dreams come true! It makes editing pages easy from anywhere you have access to a computer. The configuration is simple and the UI is great. The ability to use your git repo as a CMS database was something I dreamed (literally dreamed) about a year ago. It has a few bugs as it's still under active development, but the major functionality is there.
I chose Tachyons because it's dead simple. I like that I can use as much or as little as I want. Bonus points because of the low specificity of selectors, dead simple typography, and intuitive class names. The documentation is pretty great too.