Now my site is live I will publish my first blog posts. Until now, I wrote my blog posts for the first days of the coding challenge in a Google Drive document. Today I will paste them into my Gatsby blog and use it from now on.
The site that I use uses markdown for writing pages and posts. So what you basically do is create a markdown file for each blog post and place it in the designated folder. This markdown file consists of metadata and the actual blog post. As soon as Gatsby notices a new file was created it is automatically added and displayed on the site. So today I created 3 blog posts, for days 0, 1 and 2 of my 100 days of Code challenge.
Let me tell you some more about my development environment. I started with CodeSandbox, but I soon realized that my Gatsby site does not work there. I expected that every change I made in either the Gatsby code or when writing pages or posts would immediately be reflected on the website I see in the CodeSandbox preview pane. This is unfortunately not the case so I switched to Visual Studio Code. How I work now is pushing changes from VS Code to Github and wait for Netlify to deploy these changes.
It would be better to have a local development environment and push the changes to Github & Netlify as soon as they are ready to publish. That would speed up the development process and prevent the live site from having bugs as I am experimenting with Gatsby. But that's something to fix later. Today I have published some blog posts and I tweaked the layout of the website to make it look better.