Blog
Source for my blazing fast blog.
Features
- Responsive and streamlined design.
- GatsbyJS compiles the blog into HTML+CSS+JS so hosting the blog costs nothing at providers like Netlify.
- Blazing fast UX: The website is visible and functional after only 1 round trip and ~20kB of data. That first round trip can be super fast to anywhere in the world, because the blog is only static assets which can be delivered by CDN. Subsequent pageloads render ~instantly thanks to link prefetching.
- Autogenerated tracedSVG image placeholders are stylized to create a smooth look and transition as the image loads without the page jumping around.
- Write blog posts into Markdown files (easy to format and content will not be married to any platform).
- Expandable: possible to embed custom React components into Markdown.
- Posts organized by tags.
- Teasers of posts are generated to front page with infinite scroll which gracefully degrades into pagination.
- Allow readers to be notified of updates with RSS feed and email newsletter.
- Contact Form.
Feel free to fork
You are free to use this repo to create your own blog (code is MIT licensed). You may also use the written content in this blog however you like, provided that you give appropriate credit (CC BY 4.0).
How to create your own blog with this repo
- Basic setup
- Prerequisites: learn about ReactJS and GatsbyJS.
- Fork and
npm install
. - Run in development mode with
gatsby develop
. First run will take several minutes, but subsequent runs will be faster. - Run in production mode with
gatsby build && gatsby serve
(or./fastbuild.sh
). If you want to deletecache
andpublic
before building, use./slowbuild.sh
(recommended for releases to avoid leaking development data). You may have to make the scripts executable before you are able to run them (chmod +x filename
).
- Make it your own
- Go through everything in
content/meta/config.js
andcontent/pages
andcontent/parts
- Search all files for "atte" and "greg".
- When you publish, make sure caching and redirects work reasonably. I recommend Netlify, in which case cache configuration in
static/_headers
is fine and you just need to edit 1 line instatic/_redirects
. - Move your own icons into
src/images/app-icons
, runnpm run generate-app-icons
, then replacestatic/favicon.ico
. - There is an e-mail newsletter link on the
Follow
page. Either set one up or remove the link. - There is a Contact page. Remove it or Setup Contact Form submission via Google Script.
- [OPTIONAL] If you want a "Hero" section at the top of the home page, just set
hero.hide
tofalse
intheme.yaml
. - [OPTIONAL] If you want Google Analytics: add
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=123456
to environment variables. - [OPTIONAL] If you want a Search page with Algolia: mostly follow instructions from here. Search for commented out code with 'algolia'.
- Go through everything in
- Creating content
- Blog posts are in
mock_posts
andposts
folders. By default only mock posts are used (to help you tweak the website before you have a lot of content). You can switch to real posts by creating a.env
file withPOSTS_FOLDER=posts
. Please delete my real posts when you begin tinkering. - When you create posts, a folder with a name like
2020-03-05--my-book-review
will be published, whereas a name likemy-book-review
will be considered a draft and will not be published. There are ways to accidentally publish drafts. If you are worried about that, the easiest way to avoid it is to deploy your site from GitHub via Netlify and never commit draft posts to the repo. - It's good practice to not add the
.env
file to repo. When you publish your blog, find out how you can add environment variables to your host. - If you don't want your images to be auto cropped, crop them by yourself to 2.222 aspect ratio.
- Blog posts are in