Website builders are one of the staple products of the internet. From Geocities in 1994, to Blogger in 2004, to Squarespace in 2014, to Gatsby in 2020, these tools continue to occupy a central place on the web. However, one of these things is not like the other…
You can draw a straight line between Geocities and Squarespace, in terms of functionality and interface. If you transported a 1994 Geocities user twenty years into the future, that person would be able to start using Squarespace within a few minutes. But they would be utterly flummoxed by Gatsby, and similar cloud native tools like Jekyll, Hugo and NextJS.
It’s not that websites themselves have changed (much). They’re still rendered with HTML and other web standards like CSS. But how they get compiled and delivered has changed a lot in the past few years.
Gatsby is what’s known as a “static site generator,” which the company defines as “a software application that creates HTML pages from templates or components and a given content source.” Once created, the HTML pages are delivered to users via content delivery networks (CDNs), rather than web servers, which makes delivery speedier and more resilient.
The full functionality of Gatsby’s platform is more akin to WordPress than Squarespace. As CEO and co-founder Kyle Mathews told Forbes, “we think of ourselves as the [content management system] for the cloud era.”
That said, you can create a personal Gatsby website in a matter of minutes on Gatsby Cloud, the company’s commercial platform released last November. Gatsby Cloud is similar to WordPress.com, in that all the backend technology is hosted by the company.
I decided to give it a spin. After checking a couple of Gatsby Cloud options, connecting to my GitHub account, and creating a free account at the “headless CMS” service Cosmic JS, I soon had a “Gatsby provisioned blog” set up.
Compared to a traditional website builder or CMS, it takes a bit of time to adjust to the new lingo (e.g. you “trigger build” instead of “publish”). Also you have to get used to working with more than one service. For instance, I updated my content in Cosmic JS (it’s called a “headless CMS” because there’s no presentation layer; it’s just the content by itself).
#cloud native #development #gatsby
