Goodbye Jekyll, hello eleventy

For a long time, I used to have my website running Github pages, being created by jekyll. And it was working fine. The only drawback was that I wanted to start a blog and in order to write a new post, I needed to create a new file, commit it and push the code to my repo so Github would re-build my site.

It’s not that it was a big deal, I do that a lot of times on a daily basis on my job. But I wanted it to be a little more automatic without adding a whole WordPress monster (or anything similar).

So, a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this video where I was introduced to some unknown things (to me at least) one of them was 11ty that was basically a javascript replacement for jekyll. The other was netlify, which came into place basically as a hosting provider (with some interesting features)

At this point, everything was going to be more or less the same as before, the only difference is that I was gonna be using a newer javascript-based site generator instead of a well-known ruby-based one. And that I was gonna be hosting the site on netlify instead of github.

But, another cool thing about netlify is that you can set up a CMS and it is called -yes, you guessed it- NetlifyCMS. Basically what this does is give you the option to add new content to the site (in this case blog posts) without having to manually create a file and push it to the git repo. It creates the file for you and pushes it to the repository so the site could now be created with the new content in place.

The cool thing about all this change is also that I’ve learned a couple of things about static site generators, and some frontend tools like postcss that I never used directly before.

Thanks for reading this far and get back soon for more cool articles like this :)