Reflecting on building my personal site from scratch, in my spare time, over the past couple of months.
🔔 This article was originally posted on my site, MihaiBojin.com. 🔔
A couple of months ago, I set out on a journey to build a personal site from scratch. If you’re curious, I wrote about my motivation at the start.
One of my goals was to build and host my site for free (well, mostly free anyway).
I initially wanted to use a hosted service such as Medium or Substack, but I was swayed by listening to many other creators; owning your content is the way to go!
Here are the necessary components, in my opinion, for a developer blog (in 2021):
Web domain
🕸 in my case, MihaiBojin.com — cost: ~$12/year
Fast frontend, e.g., GatsbyJS
🚀 JAMstack has become the de-facto choice for content websites
♺ support for SSG
⬇ content rendering with Markdown
🔎 good out-of-the-box SEO
💼 RSS feed generation
🗺 sitemap generation
⚡️ Accelerated Mobile Pages support (via plugins)
Cloud hosting solution
I chose Gatsby Cloud — cost: 🆓
Decent UI
⛵️ I’m not a designer, so I settled for buying TailwindUI — cost: 250€ (lifetime purchase)
CI/CD pipeline
🚢 I’m hosting my code on GitHub
🪝 and triggering builds using a webhook that sends events to gatsbyjs.com
Ability to send newsletters
📧 I integrated ConvertKit — cost 🆓 for up to 1,000 subscribers
Analytics and SEO
🧐 I set up Google Analytics — cost: 🆓
🔍 Google Search Console — cost: 🆓
🐦 and Ilo.so for Twitter — cost: $15.00/month
Content syndication
📬 I cross-post to Dev.to (using RSS)
Social posts
📱 I schedule social posts using Missinglettr — cost: $19.00/month
Total monthly cost: $35.00/month.
It took me a few months of working in my spare time to get here. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start that enables me to write and publish content that I own 100%.
My initial plan was to write about Software Engineering. However, I started having fun while learning GatsbyJS, GraphQL, and refreshing my Javascript/React skills.
So I took a slight detour and wrote about building my site, building in public.
While I like what I achieved with Gatsby, I found myself fighting it while trying to achieve various outcomes. Also, some of the promises it makes are downright false; one such example is support for ⚡️ AMP. This should be achievable through a third-party plugin, but in my experience, that plugin is challenging to work with.
This leads me to my “next” adventure (pun intended) — the second version of my site!
I have been looking with great interest at NextJS 11. Friends tell me it’s “the way” to do React nowadays. It has all of Gatsby’s capabilities and more. But most importantly — it relies much more on vanilla JS/TS instead of custom (and mostly unmaintained) GatsbyJS plugins.
I don’t know when I’ll have time to start this project; I expect it won’t be any time soon.
For now, my current stack works and allows me to focus on what really matters — my content. But I can’t shake the feeling that my code is getting messier by the day…
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