Setting up my website with 11ty

When I first started creating my summaries and cheat sheets, I was faced with the challenge of how to share them with others. For a while, I used Polybox, and I even developed a simple static HTML website that I hosted on my personal ETH page.

However, I was never truly satisfied with this solution. Over the past six months, I experimented with various static site generators, such as Jekyll and Hugo. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a theme that truly resonated with me, and I wasn't keen on investing the time to build my own theme from scratch.

Then, around Christmas, I signed up for a hackathon, and I decided to prepare by delving into JavaScript and other web development tools. As I gained more knowledge, I thought, "Why not use this newfound expertise to enhance my website?" After giving my site a fresh, eye-catching background, I drew inspiration from other Polyring sites and decided to add a blog section. However, hand-coding a blog from scratch was quite time-consuming, so I started exploring static site generators.

That's when I stumbled upon 11ty, a static site generator that keeps things delightfully simple while offering support for Markdown and Nunjucks templates. The process of transitioning my old page to 11ty was surprisingly smooth, and in no time, I had the first version of my upgraded website up and running. All that was left was some CSS adjustments and creating Nunjucks templates. I'm genuinely thrilled with 11ty and how user-friendly it is.

Looking ahead, I plan to introduce more features like code highlighting and possibly automating site deployments. Currently, I use GitHub Actions for building the site, but deploying it manually. You can explore the source code on GitHub.

Now that I have my new blog section, I felt compelled to write this inaugural blog post. Normally, I'm not a fan of writing. I often worry about making too many mistakes or not crafting the perfect text. However, this blog is not about creating flawless posts; it's more of a journal for me. I want to be able to quickly write about interesting topics without the pressure of extensive proofreading or creating impeccably smooth text. With time, my writing might improve, but for now, thank you for reading my first blog post. I hope you'll stick around, even if it's just for my summaries! 😊