Embracing Change

Welcome to the new design for this site. I'm now using Eleventy (11ty) as the static site generator and hopefully this one will be around for a while longer than the last! To get started quickly, I picked one of the many templates available for 11ty.

The one I used was the Eleventy Base Blog v8, a simple starter that had the foundations of a blogging site already set up. Using this template helped me save a lot of time instead of building completely from scratch. But, it lacked some of the features of my original blog so I made a couple of modifications to it. I felt the default styling just didn't quite match what I wanted, so I used Tailwind, a popular CSS framework to give the site a modern yet minimal look and feel.

Why now? #

I've been thinking of moving away from Jekyll for a number of reasons now. The most obvious reason is the dependency on Ruby. Having to deal with its dependencies and versioning just to maintain my static site felt cumbersome at times. Although Jekyll has been reliable for some years now, I wanted something that can be managed using a familiar package management tool such as NPM. 11ty is available as an NPM package which makes it the ideal choice for my needs. It's also highly configurable and has excellent documentation covering most areas.

What next? #

I still need to migrate all of the old content which should be straightforward enough as it's all written in Markdown. However, there needs to be some manual adjustments done to make sure the layout and formatting is consistent with its frontmatter metadata. Expect to see the old content migrated to this new setup in the coming weeks. In terms of this site redesign, I still have a few remaining features that I'm working on so this is far from the final product and there's still some things yet to come. More on that in the next update.