Dear all,
It is with a great pleasure that I announce the creation of my new personal website!
I must admit I tought it would be simpler to create a personal website online. After all, a simple expressjs site, and voilà! The world would be aware of my existance !
Actually, even if developping the site itself was not problematic, hosting it (on the cheap) started to create troubles. I looked at OVH prices for a website, and the problem was that it could not host nodejs sites (at least for a good price). Wordpress, drupal whatever, but no nodejs.
OK, no problem, I have the AWS free tier, so, it should not be a problem, right ?
So I looked first to EC2 instances. Price ok but maybe overkill for a simple site. After all, It seems that the easier and cheaper way to go is to create a static site and have it hosted on Amazon S3.
So I looked on different ways to create a static website. Hugo seemed popular, but I did not want to dable in a new language, so I looked on node based site, and I found HEXO, who looked simple enough. The advantage is that it includes a blog mechanism, and it is always good to update your website with new content, so google is happy and move you site in its rankings.
So all good, I was able to create a nice website in hexo, not so waw, but OK nevertheless.
Unfortunately, after having it hosted on Amazon S3, I had a little problem. The top links were made on the root folder, which is normally not a problem since your server would automatically look for "index.html" if it did not found it. On S3, no way (unless going through Cloudflare, but I wanted first to see if I could bring my site online).
So let's try something else. GatsbyJS is also a static site generator, but with an emphasis on React for performance. I did not dabbled in react before, so that was a good opportunity to play with it.
Gatsby has its own quirks, especially with image and its internal graphQL system, that I will detail later. So I played with it, and finaly came with this site.
I will post later a more detailed story of all the steps that were needed before attaining this result.
Stay tuned !