My previous journey into the world of self hosted blogging involved using Gatsby with Contentful. The best thing about it was that it worked.

It had all the cool things:

  • React
  • GraphQL
  • NodeJS
  • Fancy Image Resizing
  • Prefetching
  • Other things that you can probably glean from their docs

It would be disingenuous to say it is a bad solution. In fact, it’s such a good solution that Gatsby recently raised $28m to further do more Gatsby-things.

Goals

My hard goals for creating a new blog were fairly general.

  • Avoid copy pasta - Use Templates
  • Use Markdown
  • Minimize JavaScript use
  • Minimize resources
  • Make it fast
  • Make authoring content easy

To be fair to Gatsby, it meets most those goals. But with the freedom of choice, it felt too heavy for my desired end result, which is mostly plain text content.

Hello, Jekyll

Jekyll is my next step. I think it’s simple enough.

We’ll see where it goes.