It amazes me that these things are not as easy as Medium or Blogger or Wordpress.

There should be a Digital Ocean script that sets up a basic personal blog on Github pages/Gitlab pages/Netlify. The server let’s me pick a theme, a host, I set up the blog.

I never know if the static pages use Gatsby or Hugo or Jekyll or Pelican.

Use of a CLI would be strictly optional. It might even give me the option of porting my pages, posts and structure from one vendor to another.

The other problem I have is the lack of themes. You spinup WP and have access to a load of themes, but not with Gatsby.

Its not to say it wont get there - but I dont have the time to be writing my own themes

I setup this https://bun4.com for you. Make a Pull Request on https://github.com/pinehq/bun4 and it automatically compiles. Stop complaining and start writing ;)

Thank you.

Could you add a CLI I can use to quickly download my... just kidding.

The closest solution to what you described in my opinion is Publii, which is open source and works very well with many static hosts. The whole process outlined in the article is very complicated and utterly unnecessary if you are not a developer and just want to publish a simple blog or site.

Publii seems great. I checked out an early version when it wasn't quite ready for prime time.

You're right, it is (now?) close to what I was thinking.

However, I was thinking of the developer who just wants to publish a blog. They may wish to go in and tweak things if they want, but sometimes they just want to write about -- I don't know, another way to visualize matrix multiplication -- and don't want to spend an hour updating their RVM to run Jekyll because this theme isn't compatible with the old ruby or whatever.

The themes are quite easy to tweak and all that tech stack upgrade mess is just not an issue. You can update the app itself just by downloading the new version. So it's nice for busy developers too.

I recently wanted to do a small project in React and found this site: https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html. It was a painless, plug-and-play solution that got me coding within 3 minutes. I didn't need any data from external APIs. Obviously Gatsby would have been overkill here -- but that left me wondering why anyone would use Gatsby at all, since it's billed as "the static React site generator", and I had done that easily without it.

This tutorial is appropriately concise and answered my question perfectly: Gatsby's main use case seems to be when you want to repeatedly generate a static site dependent on some data source changing (e.g. blogs, online stores, etc.)

The main advantage is Gatsby pregenerates the initial markup for your website, so it loads faster and can work OK without JS. That example from the React docs has to load the JS bundle before showing any content and won't render at all if Javscript is disabled

Thank you, that's precisely what I've been looking for but have not been able to put into a google search!

Don’t forget to set GATSBY_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 in your environment.

Just click around that site and notice how crazy FAST it is!