Biome of Ideas

Writing My Blog With Eleventy

Table of Contents

Introduction

This is at least my third time trying to start a blog.

First, I experimented with using Org Mode's HTML exporting feature to create posts; unfortunately, that didn't get me far, though there are some interesting attempts by others to this end. I might've published this material at some point, but at any rate it didn't stay up long. An early topic from this time include a post about a Java build system I once wrote that scanned a .java file for its dependencies (defined by things like package imports and code syntax), so that those would get passed into javac along with the target file.

Hugo

I then started writing a blog using Hugo. Hugo was my first encounter with an SSG. Because of this, I was a bit impatient with Hugo, and hit a wall every time I came across any sort of complexity. I also got frustrated with how themes never follow a consistent template; each does something different, with different elements, and so each one effectively has different rules. In the end, I published a blog post or two on GitHub pages using this setup. It was passable, but in the end configuring it still felt wonky and cargo-culted.

Another reason for why I didn't have success with Hugo was my use of ox-hugo. It's a fun package, and you can tell the author put a lot of love into it. However, using Org Mode as a middleman between you and Hugo obfuscates the nature of Hugo, something I'm realizing now as I go deeper into using Eleventy.

Eleventy: The Soup Actually Tastes Good

I went ahead and did a little bit of "shopping" for SSGs. I ran into Eleventy. I watched the author's intro video, and immediately took a liking to it. After a few false starts, I cloned their official starter project, tweaked it here and there, and the rest is what you're currently looking at.

A huge shift in my thinking which made the leap from Hugo to Eleventy possible occurred when I learned to stop worrying and love the Markdown.

I used to think of Markdown as an icky, second-rate version of Org Mode. Then, I eventually got the hang of writing Markdown using Emacs' markdown-mode package, which is a masterpiece of a plugin: it makes the experience of writing Markdown rival that of using Org, and smoothes out a lot of Markdown's pain points (significant whitespace, noisy links, etc.) And so I slowly let go of the attachment of using Org Mode in all the things, and embraced the idea of writing blog posts directly in Markdown; this also alleviated the complexity of sundry issues arising from exporting from Org to Markdown.

At first, Eleventy looks like a deceptively complex pile of language soup: JS, Markdown, templating languages, HTML, and CSS—at times all occurring within the same file—all somehow live under one roof. However, tweaking the starter project ended up being a relatively easy, even pleasant experience.

Painless Deployment

Even deployment is simple. This site's content is version-controlled locally. I then build the site, then simply scp the _site directory to the appropriate directory in my VPS, where this blog is hosted. The previous remote _site directory is simply overwritten with the new files. I don't need a GitHub workflow, as I did when using Hugo with GitHub pages; I don't even need to push to a remote repo. Copying the files suffices.

Conclusion

On the one hand, I'm nowhere near able to make something like the starter project from scratch. On the other hand, neither am I daunted. Eleventy in a sense reminds me of Emacs, in that there's a certain joy to be found in its eclectic complexity. I look forward to continue using Eleventy as I grow this blog.