You may ponder whether a blog is even worth it in the first place. You may think, "but people have already covered what I want to write about" or "am I even good enough to teach other people?".
I'm here to tell you YES, you should start a blog. If you don't believe me, even look at Catalin's tweets, he goes on about it all the time.
Anyway, hopefully, I've convinced you by now.
Gatsby Starters
I'm not experienced with Gatsby at all. Making my blog was my first experience with Gatsby. Therefore, I would recommend starters if you're not experienced with Gatsby or graphQL, as starters provide the functionality of a blog.
On Gatsby's website, there is a section where there are official Gatsby starters as well as community-made ones (link to Gatsby blog starters page). Here you can find many different open-source starters. There are 3 options here: you simply pick one and use it. You pick one, customise it to your liking, or lastly, you don't like the look of any, and want something different.
If you decide to use one of these starters you should clone it to your local environment. You could either do this using the Gatsby CLI - using a command such as
gatsby new gatsby-starter-blog https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog
or, you could visit the starter's GitHub page and either download it or click "use as template".
Either way, here's the one I used and customised - link to starter.
Gatsby Themes
You may also decide to use a theme. As stated on the official Gatsby site (from the time of publishing this post) -
"Gatsby themes are plugins that include a gatsby-config.js file and add pre-configured functionality, data sourcing, and/or UI code to Gatsby sites. You can think of Gatsby themes as separate Gatsby sites that can be put together and allow you to split up a larger Gatsby project!".
Essentially, you would want to use a theme if:
- You already have an existing Gatsby site and can’t start from a starter
- You want to be able to update to the latest version of a feature on your site
- You want multiple features on your site, but there is no starter with all the features — you can use multiple themes, composed in one Gatsby site
If you want to learn to use a theme you should refer to Gatsby's official docs.
Some themes I recommend would be from LekoArts – link to LekoArts' theme site
Some links that might be useful:
I hope this article convinced you that a blog is worth creating, it can help you consolidate your knowledge, it's valued by employers, and you share value to others! 💙
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