I first set up a Medium blog in 2016. Their code snippets and code blocks were visualized as dark grey text on a light gray background. That combination is unreadable for regular text and particularly unreadable for programming code, which should generally have colorful syntax highlighting.
It’s now 2019 and Medium’s code highlighting has not changed one bit. Nothing in the slightest! Ugh. This is what code highlighting with Medium’s code blocks looked like then and looks like today:
This is code highlighting with Gatsby’s official PrismJS plugin:
const greet = (name: string) => {
console.log(`Hello, ${name}!`);
};Wow! So much better.
But What’s Gatsby?
Gatsby is a site generator for React. Meaning: you write your website template and content with React, and it handles all sorts of infrastructure work for you.
This site you’re on has the following written out manually:
- React components and accompanying styles for the page layout
- Markdown files for blog articles
- That PrismJS plugin, as an npm dependency
Gatsby manages the rest of the site:
- Super duper fast Webpack rebuilds
- Server-side rendering of pages, including SEO workings
- Integrating plugins such as PrismJS and fancy image loading
It’s pretty nifty. I’m going to transfer my old Medium blog posts over to this new format, then replace the Medium content with links to the new site links. So long, Medium!