Eleventy

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post… it’s been on my mind to get back into writing words in order for a a few months now. But about a year ago I took down my old site (The old site was PHP, Codeigniter + MySQL) and replaced it with a simple one pager.

When I did that, I had in the back of my mind to update everything to be built off of a static site generator, but I never really made the time to do that (I had toyed with a couple between then and now, Metalsmith and Gatsby, but didn’t really get far). Today I replaced everything with Eleventy. It bills itself as “a simpler static site generator”. So far my experience has been pretty positive.

I’ve been reading through the documentation and over the shoulders of some great people on the internet to get my head around how it all works.

My setup at the moment is Eleventy + Markdown + Nunjucks + Gulp. Keeping it simple. The code is all on it’s Github repo so you can look over my shoulder if you so desire.

There’s a lot more that I want to do with this:

• ✅ backfill the old blog posts from the old blog.
  Done: September '18
• ✅ add in canonical links for content that I originally posted elsewhere.
  Done: August '18
• ✅ add in links to blog posts I’ve written elsewhere on the internet.
  Done: August '18
• ✅ being able to handle responsive images well….
  Done: December '18
• ✅ actually images at all in blog posts would be nice.
  Done: September '18 (example)
• ✅ Implement RSS. Because RSS is not dead. Done: October '19
• ✅ Paginate the blog listing page.
  Done: Jan '21 (Blog post)
• I’ve also got some design work for a simple side navigation too.

But one step at a time.