A new start
With this post, I am launching a new version of my blog. As well as a significant visual change, I have moved from WordPress to a new platform, Gatsby.
Gatsby & Static Site Generators
Gatsby is one of a number of platforms known as Static Site Generators. Static Site Generators live on web servers and compile all website assets, content, and logic on the server and server them as static HTML files to the user. What this means is that all the time usually spent on generating a page that a user needs is done ahead of time, meaning that the site is incredibly fast to load.
Gatsby uses the JavaScript framework React to accomplish this, and given the huge popularity of React, it makes Gatsby a very popular Static Site Generator. Hence why I chose to use it for my blog.
Themeing
Similarly to WordPress, Gatsby makes use of theming. I have chosen to base my blog on the popular theme Novela, by Narative since I don't have much experience in Gatsby theming (although it's something I want to look into). Novela uses Markdown files as it's content. Meaning that every page, or blog article is a single text file, with links to resources like images. Going forwards, this means that I don't have to rely on databases like MySQL for content. Everything is stored on my Bitbucket git repo.
Migration
Migrating from WordPress to Gatsby was relatively painless (partially because my blog has very few posts). There are a few tools that can convert WordPress post data into Markdown format for Static Site Generators, and then all I needed to do was download all images and include them in my Gatsby site.
Resources
If you're thinking about using Static Site Generators, there are loads of resources out there for use. Here are the ones I used: