From Gatsby to Next.js

I've been playing with websites for over 25 years. For a long time, I built my personal site on Drupal. I used tumblr for a bit in college. I went back to Drupal when I was thinking of pursuing a job change. In 2018, I switched from Drupal to Gatsby. I've been using Gatsby for the last 5 years not that I've done much more than post about books, movies, and tv shows I've finished. I really wanted a static site that was enriched by JavaScript. I had been working on React apps at work. But I've found it hard to maintain and keep up with the latest versions of Gatsby. My RSS feed broke at some point. And I never really got into theme-ui much.

So, I've been passively searching for a replacement. Before I left OPIE Software, we were prototyping with Next.js as it had piqued my interest. Looking to brush up on my front-end skills a bit, I've been looking into Tailwind. Browsing the Next.js templates I found this starter template and finally found the replacement I was looking for.

At the beginning of the year, I migrated from DigitalOcean to AWS Amplify for hosting. It was pretty easy to set up and has honestly made migrating to Next.js easier because I could setup a secondary pipeline to run off my Next.js branch while I was migrating. It looks a lot different. A lot of things are in different places. And most of my customizations have been wiped out. But I'm happy with the result. The RSS feed should be back. Search is local instead of going out to an external engine. Eventually I'll get around to creating templates for things, or maybe not.

We'll see.