Site update: 11ty Migration + Neocities
I’ve spent the past 3 days or so porting over this site from Gatsby to 11ty (Eleventy).
A little behind the scenes info: This website and all its pages are created with a static site generator. I’m using Gatsby and it allows me to define layouts that can be broadly used across the whole site without having to copy and paste code around. This makes it easy to write new pages.
It’s also nice because I’m programmer-brained and I love turning all of my problems into programming problems. Using a static site generator is a fun experience because I get to have the tools to make a lot of things easier in a “writing code” way.
I was in “library hell” where I was thinking about Gatsby and how I didn’t really like how bloated it felt to develop the site on. It felt like overkill for what I was using it for and in general, the project didn’t really feel like something that I fully understood.
That’s when I started looking at other static site generator libraries and I found 11ty.
Through experimentation, I found that 11ty is very fast and very minimal, meaning that it was a very good fit for this site.
I’ll probably have some sort of reflection on my experience porting the stuff, but it was generally a good feeling experience and things worked pretty out of the box (until they didn’t).
The site doesn’t look exactly the same, but I have most of the main functionality of the site. I’ll need to spend more time tidying things up.
On the development side, I don’t have an easy automated way to deploy updates to Neocities, so I’ll have to figure that out at some point.
Also, I’ve been using GitHub Pages to host the website. It was a quick and easy way to get something up and running on the internet.
But lately, I’ve been interested in Neocities. I think that it would be fun to use the service for a personal project like this.
And so, that is where the site will live.
I appreciate having this space where I can exercise my creativity and speak into the void, so I hope to keep this thing going for as long as I can.