New website built with GatsbyJS on Netlify

I've had a personal website for a long, long time. We're talking Angelfire old. Back then, I didn't spend much time on my own site. Who am I kidding, I still don't! My last personal website was a WordPress site hosted at JustHost. WordPress is an amazing tool, I just never used it enough to warrant the $4 per month I was spending at JustHost anymore. Using WordPress on a cheaper host also makes for a website that isn't really fast, which is another reason for me to part ways. My old site never had much traffic, and it only had a few blog posts. This made trying some new tech an easy choice.

Hosting static sites are free with Netlify

For quite some time now you've been able to host basic static websites for free. I first heard about people doing so with GitHub, and more recently with Netlify. So, I did a little research and Netlify has some very good features, even with the free plan.

• Global CDN
• Fast, global DNS
• High Availability
• One-Click SSL with certificate rotation
• Git triggered builds
• Prerendering
• Branch-based split testing
• Branch deploy previews
• Atomic deploys
• Versioning & rollbacks
• Unlimited snapshots
• Form submission hooks

Whew, that's a lot of cool features for free, thanks Netlify!

GatsbyJS to build my new blog

With the new major release of <a href="https://www.gatsbyjs.org/" target="_blank">GatsbyJS</a>, and React.js itself using GatsbyJS, I decided it would be a good option to test. It didn't take long for me to like what GatsbyJS had to offer!

• React.js
• Webpack
• GraphQL
• Accessing data from an API
• PWA (Progressive Web App)
• Code & data splitting

With the use of GatsbyJS and Netlify I now have a blazing fast blog. Now I just need to find the time to start writing more often! :P