My Journey to Eleventy

I've promised myself that I'll get back to more reading and writing this year. With that in mind, I had the bright idea of revamping this site and moving it from Hugo to Eleventy. Mostly because I happened to stumble upon this awesome Eleventy Template by Brennan Brown (you should check out his site, it's pretty awesome!).

I came across it after registering a new Mastodon account over at social.lol. Not that I really needed another Mastodon account but I've been enjoying the benefits of the excellent omg.lol for over a year now, so I thought I'd check out the community there. That's when I found Brennan and his site, and hence the Eleventy template.

Of course, I couldn't resist messing with the default styling. I'm also very very rusty with my coding skills. So once again, I reluctantly enlisted the help of AI to spruce things up (what can I say, I know I'm lazy). I must be a glutton for punishment as I'm very well aware of the pitfalls of seeking "help" from AI. Still, my lazy streak always wins out, so I strode boldly on with it.

Mistakes? Moi?

There were mistakes made. Soooo many mistakes. It gave me headaches, lots of them. But I think I eventually managed to beat Gemini into submission, and even though I'm sure I've probably messed some (or a lot of) things up along the way I'm pretty happy with how it looks. Apologies to Brennan for the butchering of a perfectly lovely template.

If I've done it correctly, the dark theme should be enabled by default. There is a light theme that you can switch to via the top menu but I've only really left it there for the consideration of others. It's not highly styled. All of the fun happens in the dark theme, just FYI.

Why the change?

The image above is what the original site looked like when it was running on Hugo. I did love it, but it definitely needed to change. I wanted something that looked at least a tiny bit less like a 3 year old had been let loose with neon crayons.

I couldn't get webmentions working on Hugo either. Seriously, they are not easy to implement! As those are built into this template maybe I'll have more luck this time, we'll see! Or maybe I accidentally broke the code for that along the way. Hopefully not.

As for the rest - I was curious to try another SSG (static site generator). I do love Hugo, don't get me wrong, but so far at least, Eleventy seems much easier to work with. Is it slower? Not that I've noticed. I realise I don't have masses of posts or anything so far, but any changes I made locally were reflected instantly in the development site. Maybe if I had thousands of pages to process it might be different, but for a personal site I think it's fine.

One thing I know for sure - I'm never going back to the days of WordPress, that thing is a hellish concoction these days. I say that as someone who used it for years, back before it had even hit version 1. It was amazing then, but that was a long time ago and things have moved on. Static sites are so much friendlier in all aspects, and as my posts are all simply markdown files it's pretty simple to switch the SSG if I feel like it.

What's left to do

There's probably a lot more tinkering left to do. As I write this, I've yet to set things up with Netlify. Netlify is awesome and generally makes things pretty easy so I don't anticipate any problems there, but life and code does have a habit of springing surprises on you, so we'll see.

The content is lacking in some places too. I haven't yet had time to flesh some of the pages out (you can definitely ignore the poetry, notes and journal sections, they're just placeholders for now). The important thing is that I have the guts of the site in place and it works, for now at least.

Plans moving forward

The Indieweb movement is something I'm fully supportive of, so I hope to be as in line with that as possible. When so much of the internet is now owned by huge corporations, every little independent site out there is so important. I'm old, so I remember the days when that was the norm rather than the exception. In choosing this way of running my site I'm trying to do my bit to restore some real human presence, as opposed to a corporate owned social media feed that's mostly full of advertising and anger.

I can't guarantee that the content I post here will be worthy of anyone's time, but I do my best and aim to have fun with it at least. Sometimes a post will consist of nothing more than "Hey, I found an interesting link or two" and other times I might write much longer pieces with a bit more depth. My health doesn't always allow me to post with too much frequency either. That said, I can definitely improve on not posting at all, which is what I have been doing for a long time (my writing on Bad Brains aside).

Also I should add the disclaimer that although I may enlist the help of AI sometimes to make up for my dreadful lack of coding skills (I will relearn things eventually!), I never use it for writing. All posts are written by me, myself and I.

Anyway, if you're reading this, hi! Please check back in a few days when hopefully I might have made a proper post with actual content that isn't just about site changes. If anything is broken, I'm sorry! I'll be working on the site over time to fix things. I'm going to take a rest from staring at the screen before either of those things happen though!