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 able to handle everything from plain blog posts to live graphics demos without feeling like a hack.


11ty hits all of those marks. 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 that structure, giving you a lot of flexibility without a lot of ceremony. And the template-centric design keeps content cleanly separated from implementation, so the two can evolve independently.