You can also find this post on my personal blog.

Why, yes, I would love to be done with the set up of my sites so I could focus more on the side projects I want to post on my portfolio.

Didn't you just post about perfectionism yesterday?

Sure did! But this is different. Software will forever be a road with many twists, turns, and hills. 😉

In all seriousness, I hadn't tried Gatsby out before publishing the current Angular version of my sites. I finally gave in over this past weekend and decided to give it a go. It was SO. FUN. First of all, their documentation is excellent. They explain things well enough that people with any level of coding experience can work out what to do.

Second of all, the framework is just incredibly easy to use. Make some files in a well-named directory, and you have some magical pages. You can make pages dynamically too, which is one of the reasons I'm switching.

Finally, it's just too easy to do everything you want using their plugins. For example, with the gatsby-plugin-react-helmet plugin, you can handle SEO and Open Graph metadata dynamically. Which means you can have cool Twitter cards with images when you share your posts in a tweet. Which blows my mind! (Is this possible in Angular? Too late for me, but maybe someone else could use that knowledge.)

And let's be honest, I just want to play around with Gatsby some more. You see a ton of people who use it for their blog sites, so I want to take that information and use it to challenge myself to make something that'll really stand out. 💪🏻

So, what about you? Do you use Gatsby for your sites, or do you plan to? I'd love to hear about your projects in the comments or on Twitter.

Did you know I have a newsletter? 📬

If you want to get notified when I publish new blog posts or make major project announcements, head over to https://ashleemboyer.com/newsletter.

Image by Arnaud STECKLE on Unsplash.