Re-Building Lgrqvst.com, Again

Well, it’s been a few years since the last redesign and almost a year since the last post here. Time for another rebuild, I guess.

It’s not that I didn’t like working with Hugo. It was fine. Fast and easy to work with. But at work, I’ve been working more and more with Gatsby, and I wanted to make the shift here as well. I’m also a lot more comfortable with JavaScript than I am with Go, and so it feels a lot more flexible overall this way.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this design, truth be told. I think this is the fourth or fifth revision of a Gatsby version of the site, and I finally feel more or less ok with how it looks and works. There are still a few things left to tackle to bring the site to completion, and I’m going to try to get around to do that in the coming months. For now, I think it’s good enough to put online, which will take some of the pressure off and let me focus more on other things than just building the new site.

Goals

Before I started designing and building the site I knew that there were two things I wanted to include/implement:

I wanted to use an easy-to-use grid-based system to be able to control the width of images and other elements that appear in blog posts and on pages.
I wanted the user to be able to change the theme of the site according to their preferences. Initially I only pictured changing between a light and dark mode, but this feature suffered a bit of mission creep and now here we are with texture and hue control as well. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to tone it down a bit in some future update.

Technology

For building the site itself I used React and Gatsby, with Styled Components for styling and MDX for the content.

For the hosting I’m again using Netlify. I seriously love this service, and cannot recommend it enough.