Updating my blog to Gatsby

Jun 30th 2017

I updated my old Octopress blog to Gatsby. My goal was to make it easier to post new content. Gatsby is interesting because it uses a modern React workflow.

This is my updated blog. The old content will be kept around for posterity but it hasn’t really been updated in the last 5 years. The old blog was built with Octopress which proved cumbersome to keep up to date. This new blog is built with Gatsby, which should make things much easier.

NOTE: This was written for Gatsby 0.12.48. Version 1.0 has been released. A later post post demonstrates how I upgraded.

I want a new blog

A lot has changed since 2012. Publishing static content on the web has gotten much easier. This blog will be an experimental place for me to make posts. Mostly I’m just trying to reduce my barrier to making posts to near-zero and giving myself a more stable place to make notes. Choosing Gatsby is a way to get up and running quickly, bonus points for being built on top of the React stack.

What did I do?

Made a new gatsby branch
Cleaned out all of the old files
Installed the Gatsby starter blog
Did some basic configuration

Make a new branch

I had an old blog already in my Github. I cloned heygrady/blog master and branched it as gatsby. Then I wiped the directory clean and installed Gatsby.

git clone git@github.com:heygrady/blog.git
git checkout -b gatsby
# manually move all of the files to an _old folder, keeping only .git in place

Install Gatsby

The installation process for Gatsby is covered better elsewhere, you should follow the instructions. For posterity, this is what I did:

npm install -g gatsby
gatsby new blog https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog

Basic configurtion

Reviewed config.toml (set the link prefix to an empty string)
Added a personal profile pic
Added a custom config value for my twitter handle and updated components/Bio.js

New pages

It’s tedious to make new pages. Let’s add a dead-simple starter script that makes a generic post with all of the timestamps in place.

Gatsby initializes projects with a few scripts in the package.json file. This makes it easy to collect scripts that are important to your project. It’s pretty handy.

Here’s my starter script for making new posts. It creates a timestamped folder in the pages/ directory and adds an index.md with a timestamp as well as some default frontmatter.

{
  "scripts": {
    "page": "DATE=\"$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')\" FOLDER=\"pages/$DATE-title\" FILE=\"$FOLDER/index.md\" && mkdir $FOLDER && touch $FILE && echo \"---\ntitle: \\\"Title\\\"\ndescription: \\\"Fix me.\\\"\ndate: \\\"$(date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')\\\"\nreadNext: \\\"/fix-me/\\\"\npath: \\\"/title/\\\"\n---\" >> $FILE"
  }
}

What’s next?

This blog has a few main goals that I will try to cover in upcoming posts.

Heygrady