Recycling and reducing

A blog entry about blogs. Meta?

Like I stated before, it's been about three years since my last blog endeavor. It really wasn't much of an endeavor at that. From August 2016 to September 2017, I only managed to bust out seven blog entries. Not really the best showing. It was for sure my "biggest" personal project to date.

Firstly, it was built on Python-PostgreSQL-Nginx stack. Not sure if that has an acronym...PPN? Up to that point PHP was my game, and Python was just a thing I toyed with here and there. I chose to use Pyramid because using the most popular thing (Django) would have been too practical. A quick Google search makes it seems like I didn't even choose the second or third most popular. Honestly, if I really looked at the code now, I would have no idea what's going on. I gained no practical Python skills, but it was a good experience, I guess.

Secondly, I tried to flex some dev-ops like muscles using Ansible. That might be the part I'm most proud of, even though, again, I don't think I'd know wtf is going on now. It set up the web server, database, user roles, iptables; it pulled the code from my repo; it created a virtual environment; it did some fancy shit is what I'm trying to say. I can't imagine it was super good, but it worked.

Now, all that is gone, and it's a serverless, static website now. Since there was only a whopping seven entries, exporting the data wasn't going to be a huge to do, so it seemed like a good project to try out Gatsby. I'm really not good at explaining what things are, so...

I think my best layman's description would be that Gatsby takes your React website and pre-renders your pages for better performance. It's pretty interesting. Converting the old blog was actually pretty quick and easy. I just exported my blog data to JSON, and Gatsby created pages based on that (even though the finished product is only the one page). The more challenging part was redoing the layout. I was using version 2 of UIKit originally. Initially, I attempted to update everything to version 3; it was going pretty swimmingly until I found that not all of the features I used made it to the latest version. Also, I chose not to bother with some of the fancy Javascript things, so while it may look like a nearly exact copy, it doesn't quite function the same.

There was a link a couple <p>'s up, but peep it here: https://blog-markii.reallyxloco.com

So, why Gatsby? :shrug: It was something to do. And, I was able to stop my EC2 instance, so money savings, too. I've been mulling over whether or not I should have this blog be a Gatsby site, but I'm not sure if I'll pull the trigger on that one.