Rewriting in Eleventy (again)

After growing disillusioned with Astro in 2024, I rewrote this site in Eleventy. Again.

I want a library with features that are laser-focused on my project's needs. Astro is an awesome framework for building complex content sites, but I no longer believe that it is the right tool for a static site like this.

Eleventy is focused on crawling through a directory and converting markdown files into a HTML. And it has stayed the course over many years of regular updates from its maintainer.

That gives me the freedom to reorganize my site based on what works for me (and not what the collections API wants). As a result, some pages have moved and others disappeared. That used to bother me, but I can't be on the hook for preserving all content forever. The grass withers and the flowers fade.

Last time I built this site with Eleventy, I got bogged down with tons of filters, shortcodes, and partials that made working on pages difficult. This time around, I wanted to take care to avoid unnecessary complexity.

For templating, I tried WebC but it felt too niche. I wanted to choose boring technology for this site, and the uncommon errors with limited online resources were not going to be helpful. I opted for Liquid because it has support for all of Eleventy's internal features and the best documentation/support resources.

This time I have five filters: two for debugging, one for formatting dates, and two for handling RSS-ONLY and DRAFT articles. I have two partials: one for a list of articles, and one for a list item. These are used in the articles, home, and search pages to make sure that everything renders consistently. I have no shortcodes.

A few articles had interactive components that were written in Svelte or used Astro components. I rewrote those with web components, which I should have done in the first place. It feels right to mix custom elements in markdown with script tags to load the JavaScript.

The biggest tradeoff is the developer experience. Astro invests heavily in that area. and it shows. Eleventy errors can be confusing and the documentation hard to parse. And I miss the inline documentation in my editor that comes from a fully-typed library^[1]. I think those tradeoffs are worth the simplicity of Eleventy.

Going forward, I want to think less about maintaining this site. It exists as a collection of resources for myself and others. And when I have something new that I want to write or add, I have a place for that.

Here's to a few happy years before another rewrite.