Switching to a static site generator
After much umming and ahhing I bit the bullet and moved to a static site generator. Eleventy, to be precise.
Before I had written any of The Honey Pot I did think about using an SSG, specifically I wanted to use Next.js to do something. I gave it a go and found it utterly horrible. It was so confusing and I get enough of that at work so I decided to go bare-bones and write all the HTML myself. It was fun and it was simple, but then after I'd been writing for about a week I came across a problem. I had a sidebar on every page but I wanted to change it, and now every page needed to be updated. I didn't want to deal with that so instead I removed it from every page except the home page. Then every time I added a blog post I found myself repeating the same layout, and it was getting tedious. I decided to look for another SSG, and after also failing to use Hugo I settled on Eleventy.
Eleventy is really fucking simple.
I'm still a romantic at heart and I don't want to infect my lovely little site with JavaScript and I am too exhausted from work to go learning any other languages so this is actually all still in HTML. Eleventy does some JavaScript shenanigans to get the content generated but I haven't written a lick of it. My template is HTML and my pages are HTML. It does support other things like JavaScript or MarkDown or a bunch of other languages I'd never heard of, but I am not concerned about those. Basically, all I use it for is to have a repeatable layout so I can focus on writing the content and not fixing the menu or footer whenever I want to change something up.
Right now I am definitely not using this SSG to its fullest potential, but as the site grows I might find myself doing some more complicated things with it. Right now I am just enjoying the fact that instead of having the title, head, navigation, and footer all surrounding the blog post I literally only see the blog post on this page. It's so much cleaner!
~ Honey