I held on with all eight tentacles to Octopress as long as I could! But now that I’m learning JavaScript more seriously, I thought a good project would be a modern blog with some modern technologies. Let’s head into the Roaring Twenties with Gatsby(.js) and an interesting JAMstack site builder/maintainer called Stackbit.
Where did the year go??
I spent most of 2019 not on this blog (as the archives will illustrate!) but on a quest to revamp the Summerside Community Choir’s website. It was also a good excuse to try out Forestry.io as a Content Management System for static sites. I wanted to use a static site generator (in this case, Jekyll) for the choir’s website, but had to also prepare for the possibility that I might not always be the only one updating the site. So, I needed something a little more user-friendly than going into my Gitlab repository to update with new posts or fix typos.
Struggling with Jekyll themes I needed to customize led me to Scrimba.com’s online courses in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I’ve been cobbling together websites since the late (19)90s for businesses, friends, and family, which was all well and good when all most people expected was some rather straightforward HTML. Then, with website generators like Wordpress and Jekyll and the availability of templates, I mostly hacked at existing CSS files to try to make simple customizations to obvious values. But, I wanted to feel like I actually understood CSS as a thing, and the Scrimba courses are really good at providing a foundation and vocabulary that I just never picked up through poking and prodding.
Learning is dangerous!
Being exposed to more (and more modern) front end tech meant I kept discovering more and more platforms, tools and services. (And, apparently I JavaScript now, too??) So when Stackbit floated across my radar, I knew I wanted to try it out.
So now having used their site builder to generate a new site, imported (and updated) the old content I care to keep, and mostly transitioned to a new, functional site, here I am attempting to add a new post via Stackbit!
