Finally

| web development

As the title says... Finally! Yep. It's been (checks watch), about 10 years since my last post on this site. I could make excuses like these:

  • Blogging was really slowing down around that time
  • I mostly communicated through Twitter and Facebook so what did I need a blog for?
  • I was busy with local meetup groups and kicking off a new front-end developer conference
  • I didn't have anything important or new to say

But I won't. Their really isn't any reason other than neglect and laziness. Well I'm happy to say I'm back. I've been meaning to dust off this ol' blog for months now and have had a few ideas, but honestly the things that really motivated me were the latest developments at Twitter (I have nothing new to say that hasn't already been said), moving to Mastodon, and really wanting a reason to check out Eleventy.

Joining Mastodon

Why would the move from one social media property to another be a motivating factor to resurrect this site? Once I joined Mastodon and followed many of the same folks I followed on Twitter I discovered that it had a completely different vibe. I guess the best way to describe it is that it felt like the Twitter of 2008-2012. Meaningful conversations. People supporting and encouraging each other. Less politics and more about what people were doing and exploring. It just feels better. The more I read, the more excited I got to work on my site and start posting again.

Migrating to Eleventy

I've been wanting to migrate this site to Eleventy for a while. This is not to say that Jekyll isn't a great SSG. It is, but Eleventy has the community and momentum Jekyll seems to be lacking. Plus, as someone who likes to tinker with this site (rather than actually posting articles) it was the perfect project for me.

The migration went fairly smooth. The only learning curve was getting my head around the Eleventy config. Jekyll's config was fairly hands off and Sass was simple to setup. For Eleventy I had to include things like Luxon for date formatting, figure out how to use addPassthroughCopy to pull in things like images and fonts, and how to properly use filters to display tags the way I preferred. Getting Sass configured was more complicated than I initialy thought, but I eventually got it working using an NPM package to compile things concurrently.

Getting everything configured to my liking took a little longer than I would have liked, but in the end I'm very happy with Eleventy and can't wait to learn more.

TODO

Now that the new version of the site is up and running I have some time to relax and start posting again. That said, there are still some things I want to do to make things even better:

  • Move from Sass to CSS - CSS variables and using PostCSS imports covers about 90% of the reason I use Sass in the first place
  • Add an accent color switcher
  • Add a dark theme
  • Add a page for tags
  • Add a /uses page - like the cool kids are doing these days
  • Use the Eleventy images plugin and host the images on this site rather than pulling them in from Flickr (yes, I still have images on Flickr)
  • Pull in info from other sites - latest tracks from Last.fm or movies from Letterboxd

All that being said, it's good to be back and I'm looking forward to spending more time on this site.