What I learnt building this site
Tue Apr 14 2020
New-ish year, new blog. I thought I'd kick it off with some thoughts on what I learnt setting up this site.
I'd wanted to have a play around with Eleventy for a while, so this seemed like a good opportunity.
After a couple of false starts, this site is (for now, pretty closely) based on the Eleventy Base Blog starter repo.
An earlier incarnation was based on based on the Hylia starter theme, but after a fair amount of noodling around with it, I decided it was a bit over-engineered for my needs. My needs being a very simple blog. The json design tokens were cool and all, but I never figured out why all the classes were wrapped in square brackets, and I could only get the site to build if I changed a template file (as opposed to e.g. a scss file). I daresay I config'd it wrong somehow, but in the end it had more bells and whistles than I needed. I may well revisit Hylia, most likely after I've done this Learn Eleventy From Scratch course in the coming weeks.
The site is hosted on Netlify. Setting this up was mind-bogglingly easy. Just clicked a button, connected with my Github account, waited for 20 seconds, and there it was, an actual site at a temporary url. Felt almost magical.
In the past I'd built a lot of prototypes using Jekyll, and liquid templating, so it's been a pleasure to see that some of that knowledge has been so easily transferable to building with Eleventy and nunjucks, in terms of templating, but also the odd loop and if statement.