is as hard as you make it? I could have used square space or that wordpress thingy but I wanted to learn something a bit more low level.
I followed this tutorial https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html and was able to make some sort of tic tac toe game in browser. Pretty neat.
From there a friend of mine suggested that I try out Gatsby and that's what this current site is built off of. All I really wanted was a site where I could convert markdown into html kind of automagically and format it into a nice page. Gatsby lets me do all this with some extra work so I was pretty happy with that.
Some useful links to accomplish this
Using these three things I can automatically create web pages for each markdown source file and that gets turned into its own blog page.
Glossing over some details that I don't fully understand...
There seems to be some step in deployment that fills pages named like {markdownRemark.frontmatter__slug}.tsx} with the correct data from a graphql query inside.
The blog page has some extra logic around it that lets me display summaries for the most recent blog posts. Its quite simple. I just made a react component with a div and a gradient (for the bottom fade) and it was just some CSS to hide the extra html. It was, for the most part, straightforward. CSS is terrible though. Very... unintuitive.
The mozilla reference helped me out alot. Very useful for seeing CSS in action.
I'll probably have to tweak the translation process from markdown to html since it seems like line breaks aren't done well. At least double space or 2 whitespace doesn't work so I have to insert the br tags by hand which is painful.
Otherwise its working very well :)