Eleventy has me feeling more connected with my website
I've been using Gatsby on my site for ages. I enjoy using it. It's pretty easy to get up and running with, it loads quickly, and it comes with some great plugins like this one for optimizing images. It deploys easily and has all the benefits of a static site (you don't have to worry about maintaining your own databases or servers). The thing is, though, there's a lot to it.
There's no way of avoiding having to use React, Helmet, GraphQL, a complicated build system, tons of plugins, etc. After a fair amount of time, I started feeling pretty disconnected from the HTML/CSS I was trying to produce on my blog.
I'd heard a ton of great stuff about 11ty, a new static site generator that's supposed to be very simple to use. So I figured I'd give it a try. I moved my site over pretty quickly using their base blog repo, and so far, it feels great being a little "closer to the wire" to my content.
We'll see how it goes.
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