I have some longer-term projects I’ve been wanting to create. These are about learning, but sometimes they are also about immediate needs. When those can be teachable… we will do this on stream.

Here is a breakdown of what I’m thinking for our first one.

Prior Art

I learned about themes from this video, primarily:

Chris Biscardi

Youtube Video: Introducing Gatsby Themes (duration: 33:43)

I also learned from these people in my community (contact links will be updated as I can)

• Lannonbr
• jlengstorf
• The whole Party Corgi Community

When you need one

• Common functionality you keep using on several sites
• Someone else’s functionality you would like to borrow
• Create fucntionality you would like to share

We need one

We have some common things across 3 gatsby sites already, here are the immediate candidates:

• Navigation
• Sourcing from named directories
• Styled components
• Typography
• Image handling in posts

We might need several more

• Tags, categories
• Notes and digital garden
• Contact forms
• Data sourcing from something other than markdown files
• Payment options
• Newsletters and signup

YOU might need this too

Think about the “stuff” separate from your site. Do you:

• Have a landing page, contact page, about page?
• Do you want to quickly add thoughts, notes, open discussion pages?
• Do you have a desire to promote a newsletter?
• Have you ever consolidated a set of short notes into a full blog post?
• Could you incorporate a store for purchasing content?
• Could you add authentication and authorization for protected content?
• Do you have a reasonable way to manage comments (if you choose to enable them)?

Learn more with me

Quarter 2 of 2020 is a reboot of my stream. We will have 10 to 12 weeeks on each project to architect, build and SHIP a thing to production.

This project is slated as our first attempt.

You can find me live at 4pm ET every Thursday

References

• Introducing Gatsby Themes (duration: 33:43)