Blog publish tools inside gatsby blog

Introduction

Hello, today I will write a little bit about tooling. 2 weeks ago I thought about starting this blog. I asked my friend who blogs what blog engine should I use. His answer was rather suprising as he told me I should have used static website and commit blog posts as pull requests to it

Searching for the perfect solution

So, I started exploring the internet to find the best blog layout ( reactjs ) tool to write my static blog. I was able to dig out gatsby starter blog from hundreds of chinese repos which github is flooded with right now. At the moment I created this blog I had no experience with Gatsby ecosystem but it looked promising for me.

Running

Running this kind of gatsby package required me only to install gatsby-cli and run command gatsby develop. Pretty easy? Huh?

Modifications

I decided to add some tweaks to this simple blog package as it was really pure blog with one author. So to add other authors( who I don't have yet :( ) I added authors folder, so to add you as an author you need to create folder with your name and create index.js file with this kind of content inside it:

export const Artur = {
  photo: require('./Artur.jpeg'),
  desc:
    'GraphQL passionate. Code generation guru. Short code lover. Father. CTO. CEO.',
  name: 'Artur Czemiel',
  email: '[email protected]',
}

and add of course this line to authors/index.js :

import { Artur } from './Artur'
export const Authors = {
  Artur,
}

Later on you can use it inside your blogpost.

How to add your blog post

Adding your blog post is pretty easy though. Again you have to create a folder inside pages folder with blog post slug like my-very-interesting-article. Add an index.md file to it with this kind of header which is formatted by graymatter package then:

---
title: My very interesting article
date: '2018-10-27T13:23:04.284Z'
author: Artur
---

ł That's it. After writing article you just submit pull request to your fork. I merge the pull request and publish your article to website.

Publish tools

Sometimes I am kinda lazy person. I added small publish CLI to this project, which automatically using opn opens browser with prefilled url and title fields for: reddit LinkedIn twitter hackernews. So it is much easier to share your blog posts from this blog. It lives in bin/index.js folder of this blog and uses yargs and inquirer and graymatter which I mentioned before.

After that it opens a window so I can post on reddit. Simple and beautiful!

Your support

If you want to support me just star GraphqlBlog repo. The link is in the navigation bar. Of course you can write your own article here and submit a pull request. I promise I will improve the bloggin system to be the best open source blog in the world ; ).