Welcome to my new site, now featuring... a blog (jazz hands)! It's taken a few steps into the minimal direction, but apparently that’s cool at the moment.
My primary intention for rebuilding my personal site was to create something simple where I could blog and post projects. With this in mind, I was somewhat tempted to build my own static site generator in Node with TypeScript, as a method of better learning Nodes file system api. And because most of the solutions I had heard of, e.g. Gridsome and Gatsby felt overly large and cumbersome. However, I stumbled upon Eleventy (11ty) and it’s the perfect fit.
In their own words, “Eleventy is a simpler static site generator”, doing exactly what it says on the tin. It’s versatile, allowing you to use markdown, html, and a variety template files, whatever suits your taste. Additionally, there’s a small ecosystem of plugins for things like RSS, Navigation and Syntax highlighting.
I did however find the initial setup of my project to be a little tricky, lots of digging around the docs, example projects and googling, but I’ve reached a point now where I get it, and I like it.
So all in, I’m using Eleventy (obviously) as the SSG, SCSS to write my CSS, some open fonts, Cloudinary to serve images and Vercel (previously now.sh / Zeit) to host it all. Oh, and zero, nil, none… no JS on the site whatsoever. I’m intending to try using Cloudflare’s new web analytics for monitoring the sites analytics, while respecting readers privacy.
UPDATE: As of 1st November 2022 I switched to Cloudflare Pages. I'm also using Cloudflares Web Analytics on the free tier. It's somewhat basic but does the job for what I want.
If you’re interested to know more about the code, you can checkout the repository here.