Time to refresh the Website!

Beginning of 2021, I started that Website with the ambition to share what I learned from my own experience. More than one year later, I have the same desire to pursue on that direction and for that a little refresh was necessary…

How it started

Last year, for starting that website, I searched an easy way to publish articles without having to spend too much time on developing a website.

Naturally, I decided to look at Gatsby. For those who don’t know what it is, Gatsby is a frontend full-stack framework for developing static website such as blog. It uses React and so it is very easy to modify.

So, I chose a free template without any third-party database or CMS integration. It was just markdown files and some JavaScript to make it works.

Then, I bought a domain (webrtc-developers.com) at GoDaddy.

Finally, I needed to host the website somewhere in the cloud. After some attempts, I finally used the Gatsby Cloud with the free plan. You just need to connect your Github repository which contains your website to Gatsby Cloud and a deployment will be done each time you push your commits.

And after spending some time on the configuration part (connecting the domain, managing the certificates, …), it was working well, and it continues to work well.

But, I was not satisfy of the look and feel and on the fact that the Gastby template was a bit old and not compatible with the latest version of the framework.

So in my head, I would like to change…

How it’s going

Some weeks ago, I had some free hours, so I decided to look for a better Gatsby template. I thought it was complicated but in reality, I found a paid template with a design that i liked. So, after some checks, I bought it and started to modify it.

I took it for these points: It could still use local markdown files without the need of a CMS, the template was very well documented and easy to modify and the look and feel was much more adapted to my need. So in some hours, I was able to change make basic changes.

But as for the previous website, complications come when you have to design a new logo or to insert an image in a predefined area. As I have no designer skill, it was not easy. For the logo, hopefully, there are some free websites on Internet where you can design a logo. I used one of these.

Then comes the migration of the content: Moving each article from the previous website to the new one. Basically, this is a copy of files but in details, the header was to adapt (not the same fields) as well as the images (to download and put at the right place).

Additionally, to the articles, I had some static pages linked that I need to create from scratch on that new website.

All together, it took me a week to prepare the new website and to do the migration of the content.

I’m now adding some plugins to enhance the website itself such as for the comment and a search field.

The other side of the scene…

Even if the migration was not complicated to do, a point I missed with this template is that a template is a bundle of JavaScript libraries and Gatsby plugins…

And when I launched the command yarn outdated, I was horrified to see the number of libraries that were not up-to-date since a while. But I decided to stay with that today. I just updated some libs, but I will not try to migrate the complex ones to avoid going into the wall.

But I know that one day, I will have to migrate to a new template if I don’t want to spend too much time to update…

Conclusion

I didn’t regret taking that time to migrate. I have now a web site that is more adapted to the content I want to share. So definitively a great think done!