Goodby Simple, hello Gatsby

Many years ago, inspired by a blogging platform called Svbtle, I built a clone called Simple. It was pretty simple - just a minimal Flask app backed by a Sqlite database, but had some cool features. You could log in with Mozilla’s Persona (RIP), edit posts using an in-browser editor and drag ‘n’ drop images into it. It also had some really nice header imagery pulled from the Bing image of the day. For such a basic blog it had fared me well, handling several Hacker news storms where other sites would simply give up.

But,times have changed. Static blogs are all the rage now, and Simple just isn’t cool anymore. Also since Persona shut down I couldn’t even log into the bloody thing and could not really be bothered to update it.

So this is my new blog. It’s built with Gatsby and deployed with Netlify. It’s been an absolute pleasure to develop and deploy, you can view the whole source code here: https://github.com/orf/blog-gatsby. With Netlify you just push, and it rebuilds the site and deploys it in about 50 seconds.

Now I have no excuse not to blog.