RonnocBlog v2

It seemed I never got around to using the old system. It ran on an old wordpress template and the whole thing just didn't have the sort of flair I wanted. I thought it would be time to update it and hopefully start using it to document progress on all sorts of projects.

wordpress

The old blog website used wordpress, which was simple, easy to set up and use back in the day, but it now just doesn't feel adequate for me as a software engineer myself I felt like I wanted to do something more custom again just for the fun of it

markdown

As a fan of taking notes in the markdown format, I decided I wanted to be able to write my blogs posts in that same format and have the web pages be automatically generated from that content.

content

When it comes to linking to pictures or video files or really any other files I want to share in a post, I'm going to need an easy way to do so. I decided to spin up a self hosted minio server for those specific assets as I wanted to keep them away from the git repository that the posts themselves will be in.

jekyll vs gatsby

jeykll

So I tried out jeykll and although it's not a bad platform at all to use for a statically generated blog site, I had so many issues getting it set up that I just got frustrated and abandoned in search of something else.

gatsby

Abandoning jeykll lead me to find gatsby. This seemed more up my alley to use as I've had a lot of experience in my professional software development career in building frontend applications in angular so why not finally also learn react.

There was quite a bit of a learning curve into getting some of the markdown pages processed and created into real html pages but after a few days I was able to dial in some of the configuration and install some plugins that allowed me to now run with things in a way that is easy enough to tinker with and provided a lot of customizability.