Lots of Finishing Touches

After spending countless hours trying to get my CSS to look perfect on my blog site, I watched the first 10 minutes of a video by Jason Lengstorf and realized I'm a dingus. I was under the impression you wouldn't be able to use any kind of component library with Gatsby. When I think about it now, I realize how dumb that was; Gatsby is built on top of React, so it only makes sense you would be able to use any package you could with React. The setup is exactly the same and there's literally nothing else you have to do to be able to use it. While I felt pretty dumb, I was excited to implement these big changes. I've only used Material UI in a couple of projects, and I really like it. Instead of being straightforward components, Material UI gives you a ton of freedom to make changes to the code and customize it any way you like. So, I got to work.

I started with the header and ended up spending over 4 hours specifically on this one component. I don't know why it took me so long, but I kind of got lost in the code for a while. It still isn't perfect and I need to refactor a lot, but overall, it turned out pretty good. Then, this morning, I set up everything else, which took me another 5 or 6 hours. Once I had the basis for one page, I was able to re-use a lot of the styling by exporting it as its own hook. Material UI uses a style of adding depth to the site by adding layers of what they call "paper." I built it up so there are several layers of this paper that sit on top of each other. Each page looks similar because I used the same styling for the whole thing, which gives it a nice flow. In total, I had to style 5 pages, some harder than others. The overall result, I think, looks really smooth and professional, and it also resembles my portfolio pretty well.

I have about 50 blog entries to migrate over to Contentful from Netlify, and then I will be ready to move over to Contentful permanently. I've been breaking it up and doing about 25 entries at a time; it's a tedious and boring process and I can't do it for too long at a time. Nonetheless, I'm going to attempt to move the rest of the entries over either tonight or tomorrow morning, and I will then be ready to start writing my posts directly on Contentful. I'll finally have access to all of the features in my blog posts I've been hoping for, so I will be able to add multiple images and links, as well as various font sizes and styles. You can insert blocks of code, so I could write some cool technical blogs, as well. I'm really excited to launch this, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This weekend is a free weekend on Pluralsight, so I'm going to go over there and check out some courses to see if they have anything new in the way of React, Gatsby, or GraphQL. I'm off from Frontend Masters right now, just to mitigate the bills while I'm out of work, so I'm out for free resources right now.

Until tomorrow!