YNAPB (You Need A Personal Blog), And How To Do It

You Need A Personal Blog

As a developer or other technical mind, your story, your thoughts, and even your opinions can be extremely valuable to other people. Now I know I am saying this on a non-personal blog platform, but, YOU NEED A PERSONAL BLOG.

WHY?

Whatever, you do. 'Nuff said.

How?

Ok, I'll show you. If you don't have a personal domain or other custom domain already then you can skip the first part.

Custom Domain

Head to GoDaddy or NameCheap and pick you up a custom domain, you will use it in a later step.

Getting Started

Install node if you don't already have it:

• Node.js

Make an account here: Vercel (hint: use your GitHub account to log in and the next steps are easier)

We will use a tool called Gatsby.js to create the framework for our blog

Terminal Commands

Because the latest versions of node include npx, we don't have to install gatsby globally on our machine, we can run the following commands (referenced here).

You can replace my-personal-blog in the command below with whatever name you want to give your blog.

$ npx gatsby new my-personal-blog https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog

Let that finish and change directory into your new project folder. Keep this terminal window open for the next steps. The command to do this will be output when Gatsby finishes it's set up if you don't already know this command.

That's it. You're done...kinda.

GitHub-Vercel Deployment

Go to GitHub and create a new repo, name it what you named your blog in the previous step. Then copy the commands listed in the empty repo under the heading ...or push an existing repository from the command line, then run that in your terminal (from the same terminal window from the last step).

That pushes your Gatsby blog up to GitHub.

Now go to Vercel and click the black "Import Project" button at the top of the dashboard, select "Continues" under "Import Git Repository" and enter the URL of your repo. On the next screen give it a new name (or keep the existing one) and click deploy.

NOW you're done. Wait for that to deploy and you're good...

Next Steps...

If you purchased a custom domain in step 1 (or already owned one), then the last step is setting that domain up in Vercel (this involves setting up nameservers and DNS records and is a bit outside scope for this simple blog, but feel free to comment if going through that would be helpful).

Now go tell your story!

Links:

• Gatsbyjs.com to find tutorials on how to add new blog posts and pages and other features
• Vercel to read more about what you can do with Vercel