Hello Eleventy

As of today my site is now being compiled by Eleventy. My prediction at the end of December was correct. It wasn't a hard transition as far as getting Eleventy up and running, but my data needed a lot of work.

I have about 1700 markdown files that make up the content of this site and over the last several weeks I've touched every single one of them. Yes, you read that right, I did it all by hand. I probably could've figured out a way to do this faster and easier, but there was also this sense of wanting to see for myself what was going on in the files and clean them up myself. It was a walk down memory lane.

Many of my early link posts are to things that no longer exist (RIP Pastry Box) but I've kept them as an archive of the things I was thinking about and reading at the time. I was surprised and pleased to see how many folks with personal blogs still have the posts I linked to up.. My early journal posts are like revisiting my younger self and it made me grateful that I have kept it all and it's all mine. The beauty is that no platform can ever take this from me.

I did a major reorganization since Eleventy uses collections whereas I used categories in Jekyll. Everything I've written in some fashion is now in my journal. Reading posts, the shorter notes, and the longer, more traditional blog pieces are all in that collection. This meant that I broke a lot of URLs and I've done my very best to set up redirects for everything; I'm grateful to Netlify for making that part quite easy. The links and photos remain relatively the same from looking at it on the web even though the underlying structure has changed quite a bit.

If you're reading this via RSS, there's another change that's happened with moving to collections which is that there are now three feeds for this site. The main feed is all the posts from my journal category. Links and photos have their own feeds. You'll need to add those to your feed readers if you want to see all my content.

In addition to the reorganization, I cleaned up my YAML front matter. Jekyll handles that differently, in some cases, than Eleventy so I had to tweak some things to make it all work. Because of the nature of how collections work I was able to trim down and get rid of quite a bit of the front matter in some collections (like links) because I can handle a lot of things at the collection level. This is a welcome change and it's nice to see the files lean and mean without extra cruft.

I redesigned and wrote new words for the home and about pages. Living with a photographer means I'm often the subject of photos and I'm grateful for the ones that G took to help me add a bit of personality to this site on those pages.

As for getting Eleventy up and running, I'm deeply indebted to the Learn Eleventy website. I built out parts of the practice site to help me understand how Eleventy works. It made getting the initial build and collections working locally a breeze. The community around Eleventy is so gracious and I found a lot of small helpful bits and pieces I used that folks freely shared on their sites.

Finally, I took inspiration for a few small design enhancements that are going out the door from various personal sites. Thank you Naz and Ethan in particular for being great designers and I hope you don't mind me iterating on some ideas I got from your sites on these pages. I feel woefully inadequate as a designer and am grateful to know many wonderful folks who inspire me.

This isn't the end of things, but the beginning of what will be incremental changes as I iterate on the site. I currently use system fonts, but I want to shop around for some alternatives. Along with that I'd like to do some tweaking to my type styles. Working on this over the past several weeks has been a welcome respite from the state of everything and I'm glad that a website can be a worry stone. If you see any problems, please email me and let me know.