Setting up a JAMStack blog (Gatsby, Contentful, Netlify)

I have been planning to try out the JAMStack for a long time. It is not easy to get anything done with a one-year old boy at home, but finally the right moment arrived. I decided to launch a simple website / blog as 'Hello World' as I wanted to have a new website anyway.

I started off with one of the Gatsby starters, which is an excellent way to streamline the setup of a new project. I picked gatsby-starter-gcn as it uses Contentful, a headless CMS service, that I also wanted to try. The Gatsby starter comes with pagination and a Netlify contact form set up and ready to use. Netlify (am I the only one always saying Netflix instead and have to correct myself?) builds and hosts the Gatsby website.

And the best part? All of this is free! Unless, of course, you are building something for heavy traffic or with a lot of content, but probably that's much more than a playground personal blog.