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| title | excerpt | tags | |||
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| What’s Next? | From one framework to another. |
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This site is now powered by NextJS. This is the site rebuild I have been talking about for some time, but it didn’t turn out the way I was planning.
Why NextJS?
Short answer: because I wanted to learn it.
Long answer: I wasn’t completely satisfied with the GatsbyJS ecosystem. It lead me to learn GraphQL and a little bit of Webpack, but it felt largely like a black box to me.
More recently though I read about some troubling details a contractor faced while working for GatsbyJS. I was not at all impressed with how GatsbyJS handled this. Their CEO’s empty apology in an open letter reeks of “techbro culture” to me. The whole situation is a real mess. Given that I’ve personally been unsatisfied with the ecosystem, this seemed like a good time to ditch GatsbyJS in favor of something else. But what...?
For a while I toyed with the idea of making it myself, but that seemed like too much work for how little I need. I’m not that interested in tweaking every aspect of my build process. I like to find opinionated tools that align with my goals instead of making my own.
Aside: An opinionated tool in my case is a framework or library that has opted to make some choices or “sensible defaults” that align with how I would potentially use it. I don’t need to spend time reconfiguring everything to work how I want it to.
I tried to find some lightweight frameworks that read Markdown (or MDX) files and create HTML files from them. After reading this post, I was convinced that I should try out NextJS. More importantly the post told me how NextJS worked. It made total sense to me:
- Read the files we want
- Use remark to convert them to HTML
- Build pages from that output
Done. Simple. No need to add GraphQL. Right from the get-go everything made sense to me, which I can’t necessarily say for GatsbyJS.
What about Tailwind or Theme UI?
I previously stated that I was planning on using TailwindCSS and then later Theme UI to help style my site. I ended up flitting between the two for some time before deciding that they were too heavy-handed and too complex for what I needed. It also felt like I ended up fighting with the default style, trying to remove style I didn’t like. This sounds like an opinionated tool that doesn’t align with my goals. I opted to instead do my styling by hand. I only use a small set of the standard HTML elements, so I needn’t worry about making sure every single element is styled properly. Instead I opted to:
- Set the font to something I like (in this case all system defaults)
- Set some CSS variables with a color scheme I designed
- Gradually style every element using my current content as a test
- Add some font scaling
Called it done there.
Now that I have the basic framework down, I plan to flex my developer muscles and slowly introduce some of my own character and add delight into my site. I want to make it a fun place to visit.
As much fun as a website can be, anyway. 😄