Trying this blogging thing

This site has been a long time coming. I've been meaning to consolidate everything I'm working on into one place for years, and I've finally gotten around to it.

For the nerds

I built this site using the Eleventy static site generator.

Why Eleventy? It feels like I've tried every moderately popular SSG, plus a few of the lesser-known ones. I currently have sites running under Nikola and Cobalt.

I use Nikola when I just want to spin up a site (optionally with a blog) for a project. I don't particularly care to play around with the style, I just want to write stuff and put it online wrapped around a template that I know is accessible, user friendly, and functional. Then I want to load it up in my browser and get the dopamine hit of feeling like I did a lot of work before moving onto something else.

I like Cobalt when I want a light-weight builder that is entirely unopinionated, and that won't block me from anything at the cost of having to write (or get AI to write) my templates and essentially everything else. A bonus is watching the site build almost instantly because Rust.

Eleventy feels like the perfect middle ground between the two. I get to provide my own layouts, styling, and structure. Collections let me publish both a blog section for thoughts I want to catalog in the moment, plus a resources section for longer-running articles that I will maintain somewhat consistently. When I want more goodies like RSS feeds, etc it's a simple matter of pulling in a plugin.

Anyway, more to come. For now, the lights are on.