I’m using Contentful as a headless CMS for this site instead of the local posts structure with Novela.
It was pretty straightforward to get Contentful connected with gatsby and netlify so I can write posts using Contentful’s modern UI, publish changes, and deploy to netlify without having to leave the Contentful interface. It was also easy to pull in Novela’s content model into Contentful to make it all work.
The combination makes for a really simple, slimmed down platform that still provides the flexibility to easily make changes to the code base.
One of my original goals for this new personal site was to be able to play with a new modern tech stack, that was free, while having access to an easy to manage publishing platform. My previous site was built in Ruby on Rails and hosted on the Heroku free tier. But because the free tier servers would spin down, the site was often really slow on first load. And given I was really looking for a static site with a blog, the rails app wasn’t actually a great fit. If I was running a business website or corporate blog I think I would still use Wordpress given how widely used and mature it is, but for a personal website the combination of gatsby + novela, netlify, and Contentful has been a fun project to get up and live.
