Moving to Eleventy

Post 1/3 as a part of Bring Back Blogging.

At the end of 2022, I had a few weeks of holidays and finally moved my personal website from Jekyll to Eleventy.

The first incarnation of this site was built on Siteleaf which used Liquid templating. When Siteleaf v2 moved to pure Jekyll, I converted with it. Most recently, I was managing content right in Jekyll without relying on Siteleaf for content management.

Over the years, my build process had started to degrade a bit, and it was adding friction on top of the friction already inherit in writing. So, I decided to migrate to Eleventy.

Eleventy, to me, is a more flexible and modern alternative to Jekyll, but it’s also much more than that. It took a bit to wrap my head around the flexibilty. At first I found myself a bit frustrated when I wanted to a basic thing and Eleventy’s suggestion was “do it however you want.” That’s nice, but when when I’m learning, I want to know the simplest, purest way to do it, and then build up from there. After reading various blog posts, and looking through GitHub repositories to see how others set their Eleventy blogs up, I got the site live by the end of the 2022. I’ll try to go through the Eleventy process in more detail soon, if that’s of use to anyone.

A few days ago, I was reading a reading my RSS feeds with a cup of coffee, and I read a short blog that I found interesting. I thought, I could do a post like this. I had already collected some of the same data for myself, but hadn’t known where it should go. I moved some text from one draft to another, re-wrote some sections, and published it before my coffee was done. The post itself was nothing profound, but it proved to me how fast I could put something up now.

Of course, there’s still work to be done. I need to settle on typefaces. If I keep Calluna, I want to move it off of Typekit so that I don’t need any third-party scripts on most pages. I’d like to set up a good way of sharing links. I’d like to make a feed of music demos. I should probably bring back the portfolio section.

Once all of those tasks are done, I’ll still keep tinkering. The only real end goal for this website is to keep tinkering. “Let a website be a worry stone”, and so on.