My personal site (version 1.0)
Reflecting on building my personal site from scratch, in my spare time, over the past couple of months.
🔔 This article was originally posted on my site, MihaiBojin.com. 🔔
A couple of months ago, I set out on a journey to build a personal site from scratch. If you’re curious, I wrote about my motivation at the start.
One of my goals was to build and host my site for free (well, mostly free anyway).
I initially wanted to use a hosted service such as Medium or Substack, but I was swayed by listening to many other creators; owning your content is the way to go!
Here are the necessary components, in my opinion, for a developer blog (in 2021):
- Web domain
- 🕸 in my case, MihaiBojin.com — cost: ~$12/year
- Fast frontend, e.g., GatsbyJS
- 🚀 JAMstack has become the de-facto choice for content websites
- ♺ support for SSG
- ⬇ content rendering with Markdown
- 🔎 good out-of-the-box SEO
- 💼 RSS feed generation
- 🗺 sitemap generation
- ⚡️ Accelerated Mobile Pages support (via plugins)
- Cloud hosting solution
- I chose Gatsby Cloud — cost: 🆓
- (but Netlify or Vercel are viable alternatives)
- Decent UI
- ⛵️ I’m not a designer, so I settled for buying TailwindUI — cost: 250€ (lifetime purchase)
- CI/CD pipeline
- 🚢 I’m hosting my code on GitHub
- 🪝 and triggering builds using a webhook that sends events to gatsbyjs.com
- Ability to send newsletters
- 📧 I integrated ConvertKit — cost 🆓 for up to 1,000 subscribers
- Analytics and SEO
- 🧐 I set up Google Analytics — cost: 🆓
- 🔍 Google Search Console — cost: 🆓
- 🐦 and Ilo.so for Twitter — cost: $15.00/month
- Content syndication
- 🔉 I cross-post to Medium using Zapier — cost: 🆓
- 📬 I cross-post to Dev.to (using RSS)
- Social posts
- 📱 I schedule social posts using Missinglettr — cost: $19.00/month
Total monthly cost: $35.00/month.
It took me a few months of working in my spare time to get here. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start that enables me to write and publish content that I own 100%.
My initial plan was to write about Software Engineering. However, I started having fun while learning GatsbyJS, GraphQL, and refreshing my Javascript/React skills.
So I took a slight detour and wrote about building my site, building in public.
While I like what I achieved with Gatsby, I found myself fighting it while trying to achieve various outcomes. Also, some of the promises it makes are downright false; one such example is support for ⚡️ AMP. This should be achievable through a third-party plugin, but in my experience, that plugin is challenging to work with.
This leads me to my “next” adventure (pun intended) — the second version of my site!
I have been looking with great interest at NextJS 11. Friends tell me it’s “the way” to do React nowadays. It has all of Gatsby’s capabilities and more. But most importantly — it relies much more on vanilla JS/TS instead of custom (and mostly unmaintained) GatsbyJS plugins.
I don’t know when I’ll have time to start this project; I expect it won’t be any time soon.
For now, my current stack works and allows me to focus on what really matters — my content. But I can’t shake the feeling that my code is getting messier by the day…
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