I Changed My Blog

Jekyll is dead, long live Jekyll via Eleventy # Direct link to this section

I have attempted to do this change almost ten times, and each time I have met with failure. The technology stacks are so shiny, new, full of promise and yet terrible all at the same time. I spun up a Gatsby, a Hugo, a Netlify, a Ghost, a NextJS, and probably a few others. Nothing seemed very appealing. Almost all are some twist on the same old same old but executed with some cute new underlying tech and a prayer. Most of seems to dip into the React world, and that just does nothing for me. I don't need React, never have, and likely never will. I know how to use it well enough, but I find it unnecessary for most day to day driving. Then I found out Jekyll was really dead, and I did not feel like putting in the effort to follow its successor which is apparently Bridgetown.

Eleventy follows the pattern Jekyll established, and allowed me to quickly tack in some basic Javscript tools that made blog website computing come together very fast. I like that the templates are either markdown or nunjucks which is pretty much Liquid but for Javascript.

A few minor problems were ironed out pretty quick and voila, I am happy that I can publish a quick and dirty blog post with almost no effort, have it get compiled into a tiny static HTML website, and yet still have powerful deluxe extras like TailwindCSS V3, and ESbuild. No need for complex webpack or much use for node for that matter.