New blog outlook with Gridsome

Hello Gridsome!

This weekend, I was ready to blog about a topic. Before I started writing, I realised that Jekyll seemed really old. So I spent some time to research a new static generator and challenged myself to migrate to it over the weekend.

With some VueJS knowledge, Gridsome seemed like the natural choice. Gridsome has support for markdown posts like Jekyll ( via its markdown plugin ). So I assumed that migration would be easy.

It took me 1 hour migrate all my post. Given that I have only 5 posts ( lol ) - that is 12 minute per post. Most of the work is on copy pasting contents and making sure they look right.

It took me a total of 4 hours to complete the whole site. The main contribution of the time was tweaking the site and adding all the plugins I needed. Others were trying out the different starters and figuring out which was the best. I decided to go with https://github.com/noxify/gridsome-starter-casper-v3.

The Why

Jekyll performance

I read many articles about Jekyll becoming exponentially slower as more markdowns/post are added. Links to stack overflow on Jekyll’s performance:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26855552/jekyll-compiling-seems-way-too-slow
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58192936/jekyll-build-time-suddenly-extremely-long
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33524335/slow-regeneration-in-jekyll

So, even though I have small number of post, I would prefer to migrate now than when I have to deal with it later.

Developer Experience

Jekyll is great and is supported by big companies like GitHub. And if I needed to come out with a quick site, I would definitely use Jekyll. For a blog however, I wanted to have a better developer experience.

This involves:

• Adding as much plugins as I need and create my own plugins.
• Adding new code to the site without having to hack something.
• Able to use cool tech like Graphql and webpack. Gridsome does help achieve a better development experience for me.

Beside, I definitely agree from this postabout Vue.JS and Gridsome.

I personally like Vue.js and Gridsome better. Both have a special place in my heart for being so intuitive and straightforward. I love their documentation. It helped me a lot when I was starting with static site generators

Time

With Coronavirus - it seems that I have more time on my hands than before. With this new abundance (time), I am able to do new projects that I haven’t had time to do before. Probably being a shut-in does have its advantages.

So far, my migration experience has been positive. Migration from Jekyll to Gridsome was really easy. I did expect to have face some problems, but so far it has been super smooth.