3 years ago

If you're visting this site directly, rather than via RSS, you may have noticed that I've updated the whole thing. This worked fine and produced a performant, simple flat HTML site, but over the last few years I'd started to have issues with it: As such, for the last couple of years I've wanted to migrate off it for something more modern. Early on, Gatsby looked like the strongest candidate since it used React, offered a GraphQL-based abstraction layer for easier querying, had a rich ecosystem of plugins for common functionality, and was highly performant, but I made about three attempts to rebuild my site in it which petered out over time.

I did struggle a bit getting a halfway decent design, and for a while pivoted to trying to build it with Next.js instead - this was ultimately abandoned because without the GraphQL abstraction layer, a lot of the querying became a real chore, but I did ultimately decide to port the appearance of that over to the Gatsby site.

I did have to make a few tough decisions about what to drop as well: I have to admit, I've been neglecting posting on this site for a while, largely because I was working on this - it's now nearly the end of July and this is my first post of the year - but now that I've got this done, I'm hoping I will be able to post more.