Yes, I'm moving my blog, yet again. This time from Pika to 11ty. Pika is wonderful, but as a developer who loves tweaking my site, I found 11ty to be ideal. You could argue that I should be focusing on writing more content, rather than messing with my site, but I'll counter that with “but it's fun!”.
It all started when I took Friday afternoon off. I have a ton of hours available that I wanted to start using. A Friday afternoon seems like a great start.
During my off time, I started to play around with 11ty, which is a static site generator that I keep hearing great things about.
After about an hour of play, I came to realize that I'm getting myself intro trouble. As in, I recently moved my blog to Pika, and I knew that I was about to move again.
I started with the eleventy-base-blog starter project, since it was optimized with all the features from the latest version of 11ty. A few hours later, I had everything up and running.
I was able to easily customize my home page to show all of my post content (something I couldn't do on Pika). Then, with a simple Boolean property on my markdown files, I can tell my homepage to not show all the content for that specific post. This means, in my longer posts, I can truncate and only show the post description, while my shorter posts show the full post. I did this because I love going to other blogs and being able to spend a lot of time reading right on the home page without clicking into each post.
Another thing I was impressed with is the speed of the pages. Even after my tweaks, I get a PageSpeed Insights score of 100 across the board.
The ability to use my local markdown files that I can edit in any markdown editor (currently using Obsidian) and then click a button to publish to my website is a killer selling point.
I also have complete control over redirects. This means, any links to my previous site, including my RSS feed, should still work (please let me know if it doesn't).
I still need to link my contact page, update my about page, and eventually add search. For now, I'll be taking a break. :)