siawyoung.com has been rewritten once again, this time with all the fanciest things you can imagine. Gatsby, Netlify CMS, Typescript, Styled Components, Typography.js. It’s even a PWA!
My old workflow was broken (you can read about it here.) I stopped writing for a while, and when I recently tried to go back, I spent some time trying to get it to work… then decided eh, it wasn’t worth the effort.
Markdown is not great, but I guess it’s become the lingua franca. In any case, migrating posts from my old Jekyll-based system to the current one has been as easy, or even easier, than I imagined. I needed to adjust some of the front-matter tags, but the content stayed mostly the same. Good job old me for mostly keeping to the standard Markdown feature set.
I needed to support custom slugs to maintain backward compatibility with existing permalinks, because nothing is more annoying than clicking on blog links to see a 404. On that note, please let me know if any of the links actually don’t work.
There are a number of user-facing improvements over the old system. Syntax highlighting and line numbers with Prism.js, image placeholders, even faster performance thanks to great sane defaults by Gatsby.
I want to start writing regularly again, and I hope having a CMS will reduce the cognitive overhead of getting started.
Things still need a bit of polish, and some features and posts have yet to be ported over (e.g. my photography posts, which need a image gallery), but we’ll get there. Just wanted to push a minimally viable thing out there and get things rolling.