migrating to 11ty
May 29, 2024
holy fuck, we did it!!
hi! this site is using 11ty now!
there honestly weren't any problems with my previous setup (and i severely questioned the switch while working on it), but this will reduce some friction for me, especially for writing blog posts (they're plain markdown now, and i don't have to update the blog index manually anymore!). ever wonder why you don't hear much from me? that's cause
- the whole process is kind of tedious
- i'm ... not a person with interesting thoughts (or at least the ability to articulate them)
hopefully i'll be writing more soon!
unfortunately expect a lot of maintenance since i have little to no experience with static site generators. my file structure is slightly fucked but it's somehow better than what i used to have
changes
- file structure is a little different, most pages that were just .html are in their own folders now cause 11ty does that
- homepage is slightly different
- blog has a slightly new look, didn't change it much because i do like how zonelets styled it
- nuked the art page temporarily, i'll figure out how to set it up soon (the gallery i had before was really nice, but the image descriptions wouldn't show up in the modal ... also couldn't figure out how to do captions)
- old updates have been nuked to prevent broken links
that's sorta it
dear god why was this so hard
hi i need to lament about this process.
the coding
the coding part wasn't too bad! there were a few bumps in the way, but overall it was pretty smooth sailing. it just took a while because i'm uh . lazy
filestructure
"i mislike undecision as much as e're a man" – candidate for world's worst father, or something (anse from as i lay dying)
working out the file structure was a bit stressful for me (because of course – i simultaneously am obsessed with organized systems and indecisive as hell) but i'm happy enough with how it's gone . and now that it's done i don't have to worry about it much more
weird thing is that i've got an /assets/ folder with images and an /img/ folder outside of the /assets/ folder – current thought process is that /assets/ is for things actually part of the site design (header, bg, cursor, etc.) and /img/ is for things that are ..... not that (buttons and shit)
stylesheets
i've got a "base.css" with basic stuff like colors and link styling which i @import into my other files. before this i had the basic styling copypasted into my blog stylesheet which was.. Weird i think
actually getting the site on neocities
good god
okay so i use deploy-to-neocities right. it's great!
however i had to spend multiple hours figuring out why the Fuck this would not work since my files refused to upload
originally i thought my files were too big or something so i tried pushing each folder one by one. it only took a couple folders since i realized
oh, it's the _includes folder
oh shit, those have .njk files, don't they
....... neocities doesn't allow those huh
YEAH it was that easy. i may be dumb!
anyways i then had to find out how to make those not build to the /public/ folder (why would you need that anyway??)
i tried using .eleventyignore but that didn't work . i poked around in some people's source code, and ended up moving the _includes folder out of /src/ and setting the includes folder in .eleventy.js to "../_includes" instead. (thanks to ghostologaster for the indirect help)
to make matters worse there was one random file i forgot to change from .njk back to .html at one point
the way i'm writing this makes it sound a lot more trivial than it was – i'm only covering the most important stuff but there was so much debugging
looking forward
i'll be maintaining my site, as usual, and hoopefully blogging more .. i've got a few ideas for things to add to my site, and there's still some wip sections up that i need to work on
perhaps i'll add some syntax highlighting, or a digital garden type thing.. (this seems like it could be fun)
i don't have much else to say, so i'll see you ;D
until next time!