Rebuilding my website with Eleventy
This website began life as a typical personal homepage in the mid-2000s. Having dabbled with WYSIWYG programs for a few years prior, I had finally started learning HTML and CSS. And it wasn’t long until I decided I needed my own domain name.
It was a static website because most websites were. At least the personal homepages I knew about. I eventually moved on to a DIY database-driven website using PHP. Then WordPress not long after that. I used WordPress during my freelancing years until I got my first full-time job as an “interactive designer.” I then scrapped my freelancer site and turned it into a web developer’s blog, christening it with its first post, Hard refresh.[1]
As part of that site rebuild, I moved away from WordPress and used a static site generator called Wok. But the creator abandoned it and I was getting tired of using it for… reasons. So, in 2019 I went crawling back to WordPress—a move for which I was so ashamed that I labelled it an “unpopular opinion,” despite the fact that a large part of the web runs on WordPress.
WordPress is gone. This site is static once again, generated by the amazing Eleventy. This is a bit of a long post so here’s a little outline if you want to jump to specific sections.
