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Gatsby Sparks Joy

Andrew Healey on January 12, 2020

I migrated from Jekyll to Gatsby recently and so far I've had a really neat time. The whole process took about a week of casual coding (a few hours...
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Supun Kavinda

Nice post <3

I recently worked on integrating our commenting system with Gatsby. It was a great experience. Gatsby is well-designed and super fast.

btw, I have one suggestion for your blog. The background color of the body makes it hard to read the blog for a long time for me. I made it white and everything was fine. (Just my opinion)

Thanks.

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Andrew Healey

This is great feedback, thanks. I've brightened it 😊

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Supun Kavinda

Now it's awesome!

Btw, if you like to check our commenting system,

here's the react library.
here's a tutorial on adding to Gatsby
here's a simple live demo.

You may like it. It's free and no tracking.

🤗

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Andrew Healey

Looks like a cool alternative to Disqus I'll check it out.

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George Jempty

I should maybe consider Gatsby but I want a blog that is incorporated into the rest of my site which uses Vue :(

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Andrew Healey

I've heard good things about Gridsome!

I've been using Vue at work lately and I'm really enjoying it so far 😊

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dexygen profile image
George Jempty

Thanks because VuePress just seems like overkill to me. Actually though, all these solutions do to a large extent (in my opinion).

Last year for a handful of articles on my github.io site I used my own fork of a static generator that works on the client side. It doesn't provide probably even 2% of the functionality that these other projects do and I largely just made some architectural improvements in my fork.

If you're interested in seeing what can be done with a client-side static content generator have a look at: github.com/dexygen/upstaged And here is the view source for an article on my github.io: view-source:dexygen.github.io/blog/articles/20...

If I could find a happy medium with just enough functionality for my needs and less complexity than most recommended solutions, I'd be quite happy

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Andrew Healey

I haven't seen an example of a client-side static content generator so that's cool.

My favorite blogs are almost just plain text (one, two). I'm always torn between complexity (features/easy tinkering) and simplicity too.

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dexygen profile image
George Jempty

Haha I hope the content is good because those go just a little too far in terms of plain. I did put in the work on upstaged to be able to incorporate it into an existing design, I don't know I might just give it a shot again, and it might spur me on to further improve it. Thing is because it's client side I will still need server side functionality for categorizing posts and creating menus and such.

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AlbertoM

I'm also using GatsbyJS for two websites and I really like it, very easy to use. Prior to Gatsby, my blog was built with Jekyll too, then I converted it to a WordPress site (yuck!) and now I'm on Gatsby.

I'm not sure if you know about it, but you should totally check out MDX, that allows you to write JSX inside of your markdown posts, allowing you to add components into your articles. I've written a short article about it if you don't know it yet.

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Andrew Healey

This looks very cool! I hadn't seen it before and it looks interesting. Thanks.

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Katie Adams

Really liked reading this! I've been going through a similar transition myself and seeing your perspective (so similar to mine) was fun. Great post. 😁

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Andrew Healey

Thanks Katie!

I found this article useful for generating custom paths (if you're doing that) 👍

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Katie Adams

Ooh lovely!

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tiff

How did you get internal pages on this starter? I tried this when I first used this theme and I couldn't figure it out at all.

Can you give me some pointers?

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Andrew Healey

I added them as .js files to get up and running.

There's a pattern in the starter for the 404 page.

page -> gatsby-starter-blog-demo.netlify.c...

file -> github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter...