Relaunching my site in Eleventy
When I last rebuilt my personal site, back in 2017, I was full of good intentions. It was built on Hugo, which was the SSG I chose at the time (a coin flip between Hugo and Jekyll). It had a basic theme, and could be published by simply committing to a Git repo. What could possibly go wrong?
Jump forward 6 years, and the only content I posted was three related articles within the first month. And ever since, it has simply stagnated. It didn't help that for some reason I found it difficult to get the environment set up on my new laptop...
Now, in 2023, it seems that all the cool kids are using Eleventy - and I can see why. A combination of speed (it blows the other SSGs out of the water) and ease of use (being based on Node, it’s using stuff I‘ve already got set up and installed) makes it the obvious choice. On top of that, there’s an active and friendly community out there too.
The release of Eleventy 2.0 seemed the perfect time to make the switch. This site is currently bare-bones, but if I waited until I had the site perfect I’d never get it launched (or write any new content for it).
So, I’ll be developing the site out in the open, gradually implementing new features and designs. But this is what I have done so far:
- migrated my existing content (what little there is of it) into Eleventy
- based the site on the eleventy-base-blog starter
- converted much of the site to be based on WebC components and layouts. This seems really cool!
- added a WebC component to replace images with responsive alternate sizes and formats
- implemented Shiki for rendering code examples, in place of the standard Eleventy syntax highlighter. Also added a custom language definition to handle CFML code blocks
- added Netlify CMS (which seems to have become Decap CMS since I started on this project) to make it easier to draft and publish new content. I’m hoping this will be the magic bullet that will encourage me to post more regularly!
And, for the future, I plan to overhaul the theme to make it mine; make more use of WebC components (did I mention how cool these are?); and add webmentions to my posts.
So, here’s to a new beginning - I hope I can keep to my good intentions…