🌎 Eleventy hours later

🌎 Eleventy hours later

Last month was all about my descent—once again—into Emacs. I've remained there happily ever since. Software-wise, I've been surprisingly stable for a change.

My wanderlust must be satiated, so this month I've changed blogging platforms again.

I am often ridiculed (mostly in jest, but deservedly) for how often I change blogging platforms. I don't even keep track anymore. I just do it and move on.

After swearing off Hugo some time ago, I'd moved to Ghost then Kirby and back again. Kirby is terrific, but makes me twitchy because my heart belongs to static websites. No PHP, no database. Just beautiful, raw HTML and maybe a little CSS. You know what's great at taking Markdown files and turning them into a static blog though? Hugo. So, I dusted off my shelved Hugo blog, updated things a bit, and said goodbye to Kirby.

That's when the trouble started. Hugo is fast and I love that it has no dependencies at all, but its templating language is a complete mystery to me. I've tried—for years—I just don't get it. This is fine, as long as I don't want to tweak anything, but anything more than using a theme as-is becomes an exercise in frustration.

Of course I want to tweak things.

The final triggering event came when a minor Hugo upgrade broke everything. It wasn't the first time that happened, and I don't imagine it would be the last.

So, I grabbed the source of the Kirby version of my blog and prepared to publish that. Except there's that whole thing about static blogs. I still really wanted a static website. Dammit!

Remember that time I played around with Eleventy? Well I do. And other than the whole Node/NPM dependency nightmare, I seemed to remember it being quite capable and pleasant. And guess what? I still had the source for that one too. The content was a year out of date, but it's just Markdown files, right?

Eleven(ty) hours later, I had upgraded my blog's code to the just-released Eleventy v3, and copied most of the missing Markdown content over from the Hugo site. Here's a tip, avoid using engine-specific markup in your content. It'll bite you later.

I like using Eleventy. I don't enjoy JavaScript, but at least it makes sense.  My hand-made theme is weird and the markup and CSS are janky and outdated, but I'm slowly getting things tidied up.

I've written some Emacs lisp functions to make creating new files easier, so my attachment to Emacs remains solid, and using it with Eleventy is working well. For now…