Brand New Me
I've gone and done it again. A blog refresh. Starting from scratch. Why? It's my party, and I can refactor if I want to. In reality, it boils down to a few reasons!
A Return to Simplicity
The web has trended towards over-engineered solutions. I'm far from alone in this opinion!
Platform
The last iteration of my site served as a way to familiarize myself with Sanity CMS, a wonderful CMS platform for many applications. But in my case, it was overkill! I'm a singular person, without a content team or the need for complex content management approachs.
Framework fatigue
I wanted to return to my roots and shed the over-engineered JS frameworks. All of it feels overkill for my personal site's needs:
- My content isn't very dynamic
- My content is very light-weight: text and photos
- I'm comfortable using Markdown
A static generator is perfect for a site that receives updates once a month!
Community
The webdev community is beloved to me, and the only reason I have a career in web development. I am not self-taught, I am community-raised. And let me tell you, my community loves Eleventy.
Features
Sweet, sweet syntax highlighting
Being a developer, syntax highlighting on my blog is important to me! My prior Sanity CMS setup had an implementation, but I had to set up each language as one-offs. This was often the final roadblock between me authoring a post or not.
That's all possible through the eleventy-plugin-syntaxhighlight plugin implementing PrismJS!
RSS Everywhere
It's truly making a comeback, at least in my life (blog to come!) And you guessed it, there's an official an RSS plugin ready to go.
And More to Come
I've barely scratched the surface of the 11ty community (and my own journey in blogging.)
I hope this lowers the barrier of entry to writing posts. I'm excited to learn in public and give back to the community that has helped me for many years.