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Discussion on: Site generating with the great GatsbyJS

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bilalbudhani profile image
Bilal Budhani 👨‍💻

Good article. I recently moved my personal site (bilalbudhani.com) to GatsbyJS & thinking of writing a blog post explaining my experience of the same.

Some of the pitfalls I found in the platform are:

1) GatsbyJS doesn't have a first-class support for tags in routes.

2) GraphQL seems to be a over-engineered technology to be included in a static site generator (I would be happy to be proven wrong if someone can explain the use of this).

3) In case of something goes out of GatsbyJS standards in development mode –– It doesn't throw any errors whatsoever. Just stops rendering the page, you have to manually do the diligence and find what went wrong.

I feel it is still far from being stable & needs to fill a lot of gaps.

Cheers,

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daviddeejjames profile image
David James

Awesome, would love to hear more about your experience!

Do agree with some of your pain points but I feel pretty good that some of these will be ironed out in the future as it is a fairly new project.

As for the GraphQl being an "over-engineered" technology, Im not sure about it because for me I felt it made querying an external API so much simpler than just requesting hunks of JSON from an endpoint. Perhaps it has a lot more to it than I required but its not like it made a massive difference to my bundle size at the end of the day and I got to learn something new.

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lbeul profile image
Louis

Hey Bilal,

I see you're using the Gatsby Ghost Starter, am I right?
Is it possible to use just powered by Markdown files instead of the ghost cms?

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bilalbudhani profile image
Bilal Budhani 👨‍💻

Hi Louis,

I switched to Ghost (self-hosted) version after finding Gatsby not fit for my use case. If you want to just power your site with markdown files then check out 11ty.io. It is quite easy & straight forward to get started with. I'm playing around with it myself & thinking of switch to it from Ghost.