I'm looking to re-work my personal dev site to include a blog. Wondering what stack you're using for yours?
At the moment, I'm considering the following options (but am open to others):
- Gatsby
- React
- Vue
- Headless CMS
Send me all the advice/opinions/tips you have, please. :)
Top comments (4)
I've experimented with a few setups over the years and this is what I'm using right now:
As a young web developer, my first instinct, a few years back, was to design the entire website on my own. I read books on typography and design, and all that. I built the thing meticulously, with all over the top features I could think of, some so subtle I couldn't even see it (vertical rhythm, hanging punctuations ...)
Turns out, it takes a lot of time to maintain a website. I'd be running into bugs and edge cases, and yet kept on coding new features. For every new post something had to be tweaked or added (photo lightbox, prettier tables, dividers). There was always some tangential work I had to do to make the post look perfect.
My advice to you is: set up the simplest/most familiar system that will afford you your desired features and then forget about it. For me, it happens to be GitHub pages and Forestry. The theme takes away most of my choice, and lets me focus on what's really important: writing.
The simplest, yet relatively flexible way, might be WordPress + What The File plugin, actually.
But if you need a JavaScript bundler, you might use Hugo or Gatsby, but there will be no CMS by default.
I am currently using Nuxt.js + folder of markdown files (i.e. no CMS). I might consider moving on to Hugo, but felt that rewriting my website is tiresome...
BTW, another important topic is images' file size. You might use Cloudinary or some Netlify plugins, to resize images on the fly.
I started blogging pretty recently with the static site generator Hugo. I had previously experimented with Jekyll, but I found that Hugo is much easier to work with (in my opinion, at least).
Like Nirav pointed out in the comments already, developing and maintaining a made-from-scratch website generally isn't worth the time and effort if your main priority is being able to focus on making content.
Let me know if you have any questions about Hugo and I'll do my best to answer them.
I'm using Gatsby with markdown files, but I find Gatsby a bit cumbersome to use for simple things sometimes. It works very well though and i'm quite satisfied of the performance !