When I started the process of setting up this tech blog, I knew from the get-go I wanted a solution that was quick and easy that required limited effort. I definitely didn’t want to use a CMS system like WordPress or Ghost and headless CMS would have been overkill. The goal was to write blog posts quickly using Markdown and deploy them without effort.

My journey began with flat-file CMS. I started out with Pico because a friend recommended it to me. It was fairly simple to use but I found I had to rely on plugins to get the exact behaviour I wanted. The major downside is that it’s built on PHP and I had to create custom plugins to get my desired functionality, which was a little more effort than I was willing to invest.

The next option was Grav. Why it had some pretty cool features. There was honestly a lot more to set up than I expected for a simple flat-file CMS and I definitely did not need the Admin panel.

Jekyll was my next stop and my introduction to static websites. It provided the simple setup and easy deployment that I needed. Although it requires Ruby and RubyGems, it was honestly a breeze to set up. However, it was a bit painful to set up proper code highlighting and I had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the desired look.

While I was satisfied with Jekyll, I played around with other static website generators such as Gatsby, VuePress, Hugo, Nuxt and Gridsome. All of these options are petty good and I don’t think one is better than the other. In the end, I decided to go with Gridsome.

The reason why I decided to move away from Jekyll was that I wanted to be able to use Graphql and any other modern web framework such as Vue or React. Gridsome was the perfect choice because it’s built with Vue (which I already have experience in) and supports Graphql out of the box. It does help a great deal if you use the Gridsome CLI.

These are the major advantages that convinced me to migrate from Jekyll to Gridsome:

• No Ruby
• Out of the box code highlighting
• Vue and Graghql
• Better performance
• Working with Component-based architecture

Overall, I am very satisfied with Gridsome and it feels great being able to create components again. From my observations, It will be easy to work with for anyone having a rudimentary understanding of Vue.