Why am I wasting time with this? Why am I using Gatsby, but more importantly why am I writing a blog in the first place?

That is a very good question actually, so let me start with that in the first place. About 2 years ago I was determined to write a blog about the New Zealand trip that I did with my family. During that trip I started to write about the event of the day, the thing that marked us the most and that, in a way, grounded me to each moment. From then onwards I felt compelled to think about our experiences and to put them on paper. Well, in this case on computer, but you got the gist!

This was a very interesting experience that not only triggered a new interest about journaling my family travels and experiences, but also it was an introduction to web development as I got really interested in all technical aspects of putting a blog together.

To build our family mini travel blog I used the most used blogging platform out there, WordPress using bluehost to host the blog. If my memory doesn't fail me to host the blog cost me around 98usd for 36 months, or something like that. At the end of the day around 3usd / month. Not much, and that is not the reason to move to a different platform... however performance wise WordPress is not fantastic, specially when compared with any static site generator out there.

Enter Gatsby

There are a lot of static site generators to choose from and to be completely honest to you, I don't know enough about all to make a very scientific decision. I know however, that I wanted to continue to push reactJS and was fascinated with the fact that Gatsby was super fast, like light speed fast.

More things that I like about Gatsby:

• It is a SPA (single page application), so no reloads;
• Every site is a web app;
• It is a PWA (progressive web application);
• You write you post using Markdown;
• Uses graphQL that I always wanted to learn;
• Every time that I push to the repo, the site gets deployed.

I am still learning all about Gatsby, not to mention how to code, but one thing that I realize while working with both WordPress and Gatsby is that for you to take advantage of Gatsby you will need to master React (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) not to mentioned that you will need to learn how to use your CLI. On the other hand, with WordPress you can set up a blog or site without knowing how to code at all.

I still need to move my little travel blog from WordPress to Gatsby and for that I need to learn as much as possible so that I can make it happen. That is going to be a long way... Hope that I can make it!

See you around!