Text editor showing this post.

A First Post

Ethan Glover

It's been a while since I've had a blog. My first was on BlogSpot. It contained a story called, ‘The Incredibly Close to Being Absolutely True Adventures of Captain Pringle and His Crew.’ On the maybe mostly true but somewhat exaggerated shenanigans of my friends and I in high school.

Then came the WordPress blog. Simply hosted on BlueHost, or HostGator, one of those two. And which got a little more serious. I wrote 20 pages a week on what I thought were brilliant observations that the world needed to know.

I became obsessed with SEO and getting the perfect design that could keep readers glued to my long diatribes about life. None of it worked. Although I did start to learn more about web development.

Eventually, after packing down my WordPress install with way too many plugins on a shared server, I got frustrated without how slow its performance was getting. Lighthouse scores were not satisfactory. So I thought I'd build my own CMS. I bought ‘PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites’ by Larry Ullman and got to work. The book went over a very simple stack. Setting up a SQL database and using PHP to query its data directly into HTML with PHP. Then using a series of includes functions to pull together a header, footer, and some content. From there it was just a matter of formatting the data onto the page. After I built a “backend” that consisted of a few forms to create or update blogs and pages, all I had to do was use FileZilla to FTP the files over to BlueHost, and presto, I had myself a blog.

That site certainly served its purpose. It wasn't difficult to keep load speed times to less than 300ms. And I could do all the fancy SEO I wanted without having to install a plugin and have to wait on them for updates. It was nice.

But fast forward to today, and I want to do more. To have something more declarative. To handle the minor details for me as defined by me.

Enter Gatsby. A tool I was previously skeptical of. I thought it would be very limited and very opinionated. It's Next.js or bust. But after getting more into how it works and what it can do, I'm more confident it's the place my content should call home.

With the brilliant, performant way it handles images, its hydration capabilities for dynamic content, and its extensibility, it's an obvious choice for my homepage. Add with Sanity as a backend CMS... I can just define by schema and generate the create post forms? Sold!

And so this is the stack ethang.dev will live on for the foreseeable future. And where I'll be writing my thoughts on code and fleshing out my portfolio. Expect to see more to come. I can't wait to get to work on refining what's here.