Going to eleventy

Posted on Thursday, Feb 22, 2024

It's somehow been over a year since I started this blog! I haven't posted as much as I'd like, but it's been nice having a place to stash things that are on my mind. So far, that's been a lot of Nix, but I expect I'll get around to other topics eventually.

A couple weeks ago I got the itch to redesign things around here, and while I was at it, I decided to swap out the zola static site generator for eleventy. I used zola originally because it's nice and simple, especially since I was using a pre-made theme. Once I started tinkering with the redesign though, I started to want a more flexible and less opinionated tool.

Eleventy seemed to fit the description, with support for a bunch of different template languages, tons of plugins, and a big community of users and devs. I was especially intrigued by WebC, a templating language made by the 11ty devs that feels pretty similar to writing web components using the HTML custom element API. WebC seems more "web like" than string-replacement style template languages like Nunjucks and friends, and you can mostly forget that it's not just regular old HTML. So far it's been quite nice.

I'll probably have more to say about eleventy and WebC as time goes on, but I don't want to get all into the weeds about it now. I'm hoping to get in the habit of posting more often, which is easier if I don't try to make every post into a big thing that has to deliver hot takes and/or valuable nerd wisdom or whatever. Sometimes I just like to type things out to hear the sound of my own inner voice, as it were.

Thanks for reading, and if you find anything broken with the new site, let me know and I'll try to sort it out.