In my last newsletter, I mentioned that I’m giving a mini workshop on building and deploying an Eleventy blog. I forked the eleventy-base-blog, which was my original starting point, and made some opinionated changes:
Like the sound of that? You can preview a build and checkout out the GitHub repo. The event is on Tuesday if you still want to join.
I have a legacy webpack project that is mostly HTML pages with vanilla JS and one page that is a full React app. I’ve been wanting to add HTML templating for all the regular HTML pages. Eleventy would be great, but I still have that one page that is mostly a React app.
Slinkity is a promising-looking Eleventy plugin, but still very early stage. So I started trying out Astro. It’s pretty slick. Here are my pros and cons so far:
.astro
file type.I’m still excited about it. I think it’s a big step in the right direction. I’m not sure why Webpack chose JavaScript to be the only entry point for a bundler as the web uses HTML. So it was always tricky to set up configs to work with a mixture of HTML and frameworks.
Sometimes I wish they went with a more established templating language link Nunjucks, but then Astro files can use straight up JavaScript which makes some things easier. However, you can’t dump in content inside <script>
tags. This point might become moot if they get a Script component working which will also transpile and bundle vanilla JS.
What cool new tools have you tried out lately? Drop me a line on Twitter!
I don’t have any new blog posts for this episode, but if you want a fun tongue-in-cheek read for this Friday, check out How to build a website in 2021.
Our second Eleventy meetup is next week! We’re learning about 11ty image and the creator economy. Check out all the deets on 11tymeetup.dev.
Cheerio and Happy Friday!