As mentioned previously, I’ve been really enjoying working with Eleventy so far for my personal site; it’s brought back an enthusiasm and excitement to work on my personal website that I’ve been missing for a very long time. I think this is due to a combination of the speed that Eleventy provides, the familiarity I have with NodeJS and its ecosystem, and also the energy behind the Eleventy project.

I used to read articles about maintaining personal websites longingly, some folks comparing it to gardening. When I read these, I came away wishing that I didn’t hate mine / have to sacrifice to the gods to get it running locally. I think I finally get that feeling now, though I do have a huge backlog of gardening to do to get to a good place. Basically, my backyard is heavily overgrown, with many load-bearing display:float calls haunting the stylesheets, and incorrect post metadata strewn around the shrubbery.

A recent highlight was being able to add search to my posts, which was surprisingly easy once I found a guide that did exactly what I wanted to do. An npm install, a few additions to my page markup, and one Eleventy build hook later, and I now have a neat static-site-powered search function on my posts landing page that full-text indexes all of my blog posts with minimal effort 🥳 It’s really cool to see how far the static site ecosystem has come since I first joined the ranks with my first Jekyll-powered website almost 10 years ago.

In the same vein, I’ve been using Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS) to author posts for my static site since moving to Eleventy, which has been more enjoyable for the moments where I just want to write content without worrying about the code / Markdown / infrastructure involved. It’s impressively customisable, and though there’s a few things I wish for (better documented APIs for the various plugins you can write, ability to add your own custom UI components to the editor chrome).