gatsby

From IndieWeb
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Gatsby is a React-based static site generator with live preview.

Gatsby uses React to render static pages that follow the PRPL pattern for exceptional loading speed. The static pages can be sourced from a huge variety of data, translated into GraphQL, then queried to produce a collection of pages that are generated at build time.

This means that there is HTML markup that's fully machine-readable - making it SEO/indie/webmention/js;dr friendly.

At the moment it supports many data sources:

These data sources can then be transformed:

  • Remark (turn Markdown into HTML)
  • YAML
  • TOML

(Note that these are only read during build time - so you must re-build to get new content out)

Incremental Builds

Gatsby officially began supporting incremental builds in April 2020: 2020-04-22 Gatsby: From static to real-time: introducing incremental builds in Gatsby Cloud

These are primarily designed to be used in conjunction with their own paid hosting platform, Gatsby Cloud, but a Netlify plugin provides at least partial support:

See Also

JS;DR

Out of the box, Gatsby uses the React "hydration" model. That means whilst a Gatsby site is statically rendered during the build process, pages are still sent to the browser with a large JavaScript bundle that effectively loads React on top of the existing website. Whilst this provides some clever features – like Gatsby's page pre-caching, image optimisations, and client-side routing – it can also be a performance concern.

The Gatsby community has come up with two possible solutions to this issue:

  • The No JavaScript plugin which removes all client-side React bundles during the build process;
  • The Preact plugin which replaces React with Preact, providing many of the same client-side benefits but with a reduced JavaScript bundle size.

Gatsby has also come under criticism for shipping with a default noscript message recommending JavaScript, even though many Gatsby sites don't actually need JavaScript enabled to run.

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Opportunities

When it comes to "incoming" data to this site generator, it would have to push the data to one of the connected data sources then trigger a rebuild. Even without access to incremental builds the performance is pretty good for small-ish sites to do a complete rebuild.

You could probably handle incoming webmentions by having a small app on another subdomain that pushes the webmentions into MongoDB, then triggers a rebuild of the site to include new mentions.

Plugins

Webmentions

RSS

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb community members using Gatsby on their own primary sites:

Other independents that are using it on their primary self-identifying site:

  • Josh W Comeau β€” Josh previously worked for Gatsby and continues to use the platform for his personal site.

Articles

See Also