cleggct.info

Rebuilding My Site (Again) With 11ty

I've lost count of how many times I've rebuilt my personal blog. First it was plain HTML/CSS. Then React and Tailwind, after a full-stack role turned me down for not having any React projects on my GitHub. Then my first 11ty site, with some Three.js demos. Then I tried building my own static site generator, first with Next.js, then in plain JS because the Next version got too complex. Don't ask me why I thought ditching the framework would make things simpler...


After all of that, I developed a pretty clear picture of what I actually want. Content that lives separately from the site plumbing, so I'm not rewriting posts every time I rework the internals. Something simple enough that I can come back after six months away and immediately understand how the pieces fit together. Modular, easy to extend, and flexible enough to handle many different types of content.


11ty achieves all of that. Your filesystem is your sitemap; the directory structure doubles as site configuration, readable at a glance. The data cascade lets you attach metadata and settings to entire branches of this structure, giving you a lot of power and flexibility while keeping the logic transparent and simple. And the template-centric design keeps the content separate from the implementation so the two can evolve independently.