I have now done a complete overhaul of my site to bring it more in line with the modern era. The previous iteration of my site was a basic PHP/MySQL creation that was utilizing a custom framework that I had made years ago. Rather than maintain this dinosaur any more I decided to upgrade to a more modern approach.

Gatsby

Checking out all of the available options I went with a static site generator for ease of use, performance, and cost as this is a personal low traffic site. There are quite a few options here, but I went with Gatsby as I am fairly familiar with React and it allowed me to get right into development. It took very little effort really to get set up and configured in the way that I wanted.

Netlify

For hosting I have switched to using Netlify as I am quite familiar with its ease of deployment and setup. There was basically no real configuration changes I needed to do here as Netlify picked up the Gatsby site and worked out of the box.

Styling

The styling is mostly the same, but slightly updated as I am not using Bootstrap anymore. This is one area where I will likely spend some more time in the future as I want to have an aesthetically pleasing site, but at the same time I want it to load extremely fast. I will definitely sacrifice looks for performance!

Contact

My contact form is now utilizing Netlify Forms, but this is something I definitely want to change. While it is nice I'd rather use a Lambda or something more customizable to my needs.

Conclusion

Overall this has been a fun exercise and I'm hoping to continue to add more features and blog posts. I already have a few post ideas lined up to connect with my latest work. Let me know if you have any questions about the setup or have any comments on the updates!