Starting Fresh

May 26, 2020

I've decided to start a new blog. And rather than carry over the baggage from the old one, I figured I'd start fresh and forego the old content for the time being.

Gatsby?

Yep! I'd heard a few different people on separate occasions talking about using it for their projects, but never gave it any real thought. It wasn't clear to me what it was bringing to the table, and so perhaps I underestimated it.

Meanwhile, I didn't really want to deal with databases or web servers or hosting or SSL or [...remainingTedium] —really any of those burdens that come along with a typical framework + web server + database + hosting provider setup. The last version of harvtronix.com was written completely from the ground up, including the web server. No JS libraries, no PHP framework, no Apache or Nginx, no nothing. Well... I did use MySQL, but at the same time had fairly concrete plans to replace the DB with a scratch-written one just like everything else. But alas, it was starting to show its age.

Gatsby is kind of neat though. Being able to code as if there were a database serving up a GraphQL back-end is pretty amazing. And in some sense, there is one, but all of the reconciliation and query execution happens at build time. The result is a set of static pages that are pre-populated with the results of the various queries you'd coded beforehand. Meanwhile, the code and content driving the site can all be stored in the same git repo for ease of portability.

What to expect

One of the main things I want to strive for in this new format is higher-quality content. My old blog had degenerated into a long string of micro posts detailing the various new songs I'd discovered. The last real post was almost four years ago. Yikes.

The first order of business though is higher resolution images. I've made a giant hero banner on the front page of the site for a reason: Encourage myself to create eye-catching, juicy pics to make my posts more interesting. If I'm bored looking at them, then nobody else is gonna bother clicking either.

I'll close this first post with the general categories of posts you can expect to see going forward.