Returning to Eleventy
Well, well, well, dear reader. I'm back. After leaving my last post on "It's exhausting," I've resumed digging into Eleventy. In fact, if you're reading this, it was generated by Eleventy! Here's what I did between my last post and now:
- Gave up on tags/categories. That'll fix it!
- Gave up on Siteleaf. I'll just add posts manually again.
- Discovered Cloudflare Pages. It allows for static sites to be easily deployed from a GitHub repository, and automatically re-deploys on each new commit. You can choose the branch, and set the build command. Also, as my DNS was already being handled by Cloudflare, switching it from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages was literally so easy. No downtime.
That's it. That's all it took. Now, granted, I still had to figure out all that other stuff in my last post. It was kind of a lot. Also, I discovered a few Eleventy plugins that handled some of my outstanding concerns quite nicely.
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@11ty/eleventy-plugin-syntaxhighlight
https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/syntaxhighlight/Previously, I was using PrismJS on the front end to handle code blocks. I'd add a
custom_js
declaration to the front matter of each post I wanted to add it to, as to only load the script on posts with code. This was a little frustrating, as I often forgot to add it on first publish, and then I'd have to go back and add it.With the Eleventy plugin, this script runs as part of the build process, and is no longer needed on the front end. This is absolutely fantastic. Okay fine fine fine, it's nice when some things are all JavaScript.
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@11ty/eleventy-plugin-rss
https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/rss/RSS works fairly similarly to how it worked in Jekyll, except that Jekyll had it built in by default. I'm not sure that I even really need RSS on my site, but it's there. Also, in the old site, I had a feed.json, which was just a JSON version of the RSS feed. I did a little searching around, and it looks like everyone was very excited about JSON feeds in Spring/Summer of 2017 and then never said anything about it again. So, I let that one go.
What did we learn? Sometimes, you have to step away for a whole month, and then when you come back, the problems aren't as big, and the finish line isn't that far away. A little caffeine didn't hurt either.