Using Eleventy for system8

When I first started thinking about this project I thought not to use any super fancy JS toolkit to make it like some sort of SPA. I wanted it to be a site that could load even if you were on 3G, mostly. My experience with frontend tooling is mostly React (first I've ever learned) and Svelte/SvelteKit. I had glanced at NextJS and Gatsby for a small while.

I really like Svelte. Svelte is super cool and when I first started building with it, I was much more pleased with it compared to the likes of React. So I eyed at the SSG plugin for SvelteKit (and for a microsecond, at Astro), now having experience with it and feeling confident to build anything with it.

But... let's say that I found a simpler way to do things for this purpose. Browsing around as I usually do after making the first static, fully hand-crafted version of this site, I came across Damien's success in moving from Bear to Eleventy. Eleventy is a framework made to generate static sites first and foremost and has a very lightweight output. I first saw it when I was generating a Twitter archive (which I haven't yet posted online...) using Tweetback, as a dependency. So I decided to give it a try. After all, learing new technologies is fun (it tickles the brain) and for a site like this I think something like Astro or SvelteKit SSG would've been kind of... overkill?

I've been having so much fun. It's so delightfully simple to do things in and even though I fell into some caveats due to not being used to how it handled images, I quickly became accostumed to it and I love it. This blogpost is written in Markdown! I for the longest time thought that for a static site like this I'd need to write HTML and stuff to write for the blog and let's say I'm not exactly the biggest fan of using <p> tags everywhere to write a blogpost. This rocks.

Now then, the site is still mostly unfinished, for example there's no actual pagination for the blog pages, an "easy reading" mode to switch out the MS PGothic font for the blog or even an Atom feed (which I'm adding super soon along with tags for organization) but I want to break out of a mindset I have, which is that things need to be "perfect" before putting them out there. I've been having some trouble with that and everything stalls now because of it, so I'm giving myself more time to be more human to myself and allow myself to get some things wrong every now and then, even if the "wrong" is just "incomplete". I need to put things out there.

Thanks for reading!