I’ve had this blog go through some different softwares.
First time I did it all in raw AsciiDoc and used the asciidoctor tool to export it all and one of their stock css styles. Worked fine, but I wanted more utility. I went onto Hugo, but had some issues there, and now am on 11ty.
Hugo Problems
I like writing in AsciiDoc. I’ve tried Markdown, I just can’t get used to it. Its feature set is too narrow. The issue I had with Hugo was that eventually Hugo made changes to syntax highlighting which broke my theming. Then the theme I was using broke. All my code blocks were messed up and unreadable. I was getting tired of the constant moving target of the theme and Hugo, so I came across 11ty.
What I like About 11ty
I had already made my own static site generator for my church’s website with a basic Python script, Jinja2 templates, and Bootstrap. The theming is not easy for me as someone who doesn’t work with CSS or Javascript at all. However, the site turned out really nice! Well, with my blog being broken and needing to add some stuff to the church site, I needed more flexibility. So, I picked 11ty. What I like is there’s a lot of different ways to build a site, data can be fetched and manipulated with different modules and such, and best of all, there’s a community module for AsciiDoc!
I was able to move all my Hugo blog pages into 11ty without having to modify them any, the rest was just making the site look nice and doing the pagination. I lost my easy copy button, but I’ll add that back eventually.
What I like now is that I have the flexibility to do my own theming on my
own time, and upgrade versions of 11ty on my own time. It’s just static pages,
I don’t need constant moving targets for themes and site generators. I don’t
want to futz with that stuff. 11ty so far seems it will fit the bill. Time
will tell. But for now, I like that it is easy to just write again and hit
npm run build (which I put in the packages.json file) and get the directory
slapped up on my server.
Really, the most I had to do was make 2 templates for my main pages and my blog pages (even the latter wasn’t necessary), then do some Liquid templating for my few page types, and the rest is just writing my content in AsciiDoc.
What’s Next
Now that this is all back, I’m going to get back into writing. I have some drafts I want to finish, some I want to toss, and some things I need to catch up on, like some more of my SmartOS stuff.