Switching to 11ty
This site is now build using 11ty and there are a few reasons why:
- After even a small number of posts, not having templating causes a lot of duplication and, with it, the potential for annoying errors (incorrect description tags etc)
- Making updates to multiple pages and manually converting files/content from one type to another (markdown to html, dates to different formats) is cumbersome
- Doing things like RSS feeds manually with zero automation is not fun
I was very resistant to using a static site generator for this site as I didn't think it warranted the complexity but I was convinced by a blog post from Sebastian Schoebinger in which he outlines the benefits and trade-offs he found going through the same process.
Having a load of node dependencies just to power my personal site still feels a bit crazy but 11ty is a fantastic way to build websites that gives you a load functionality out-of-the-box whilst still being phenomenally flexible. The documentation is clear and thorough; Andy Bell also has a really good course that teaches real-world use cases.
I'm looking forward to leveraging the tools 11ty gives me to continue to build out new features for this site.