I was looking for a good solution to set up my own blog. At first I naturally thought about classic CMSs such as:

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Grav, etc.

But I also wanted something simple and easy to use since the content is just blogging (no particular complexity). A CMS like WordPress requires a database which I'd like to avoid as much as possible since my site only hosts static pages. Avoiding PHP is also a bonus 🙂 (always a source of security vulnerabilities among other things).

That's when I discovered JAMStack (JavaScript, APIs, and (HTML) Markup). It builds the site ahead of time and serves it on a CDN (or any host), making it a site composed of static pages! This perfectly matches my needs, and on top of that it comes with some cool features:

• No database needed
• Much smaller attack surface, security +++
• Better SEO
• Integrates really well into a CI/CD pipeline or any automation process (🤤)
• Apparently much faster than a traditional CMS (since they're static pages I can believe it)

More info here: https://jamstack.org/

The thing is, JAMStack doesn't come with any default technology — it's up to the developer to choose how to implement it. I was looking into which JAMStack generator to pick; there are several on the market:

• Next.js
• Jekyll
• Gatsby

And I came across this blog post explaining why and how he moved from Jekyll to Gatsby — his use case matches mine perfectly (and I love the design of his blog!)

I therefore chose the following setup:

• Writing code locally in VS Code (I have the markdown preview plugins, etc.)
• I push once finished to one of my GitHub projects
• The push triggers a GitHub Actions build (workflow in the project) that hosts my blog on GitHub Pages

Several advantages:

• My blog is centralized and versioned (an older version of this post described the old way of hosting via GatsbyCloud hehe)
• Users can collaborate on articles by submitting a PR (in practice a simple edit of the post on GitHub)
• I had considered hosting it on my home infrastructure but since everything is already public there's no problem having it hosted by a third party
• Everything goes through a single host --> Github

And a few disadvantages:

• I rely on this third party for building and serving my blog (free version: 25 builds/day)
• Not the easiest to use (though in this case I forked calvin's project)