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 delete cache and public 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 and content/pages and content/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 in static/_redirects.
    • Move your own icons into src/images/app-icons, run npm run generate-app-icons, then replace static/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 to false in theme.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'.
  • Creating content
    • Blog posts are in mock_posts and posts 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 with POSTS_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 like my-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.

GitHub