An Almost Anonymous Blog

Rocking 11ty

Sometime last week I posted on Mastodon my appreciation for the "People and Blogs" series, and how it was giving me inspiration for doing some long form writing on a regular basis. The idea being...think of a topic to write about, take notes, put something together, etc.

Then I started putting the cart before the horse again, and thought about where to post these things, and I haven't even started writing anything yet! But one of the directions I started following was setting up a personal domain, and I was looking at different static site blog platforms - most notably, 11ty. I played around with a few layout options and then realized that instead of a test environment, what if I converted my current static site from local WordPress to Eleventy?

WordPress is a great platform, but as a static site, there are major downsides. For one, it's incredibly bloated. Have you seen how many folders there are in that thing? Plus, you have to run a local mySQL server to actually update your blog. So the only way you can create new posts, or change the layout, is to log on to your computer. If you have something you want to write, you could put it in a text document, but you can't do any formatting etc. until you get to your dedicated computer and turn on your server.

For me that's where Eleventy shines. To really play around with layouts and CSS styling, you do need to be on your local computer. That's a given. But with Eleventy, similar to Bear Blog, posts are written in markdown. You can create an MD file on any machine and have it ready to upload when you get to your local computer. You still need to upload from your home machine - but you can write your post anywhere you like and have it look the way you want it to.

However, I still have some things to figure out with Eleventy:

Anyway, you can check out the new-and-improved "Gaming with lwgrs" website here: https://lwgrs.neocities.org

#blog platforms