I've been thinking about doing it for a while now but I finally went ahead and converted my site from Jekyll to 11ty. Reading about other folks experience with 11ty really got me excited about changing.
I had been experimenting with the demo blog site for a little while and it seemed straightforward what would need to happen to recreate the old site using this new system.
When I hurt my back and ended up needing to be more reclined than I would normally at my desk I wasn't originally planning to make the change. I was just going to clone the repo on my laptop and continue on Jekyll. Well that idea turned into a whole thing. Getting ruby installed and at the right version ended up being way more complicated than I expected. Actually it was so complicated that I ended up deciding to make the conversion rather than make Jekyll work.
I started with the barebones eleventy project and added things in piecemeal instead of starting with the demo blog. Although I did use it as a reference as I'm not a total glutton for punishment.
There were a few things that were not consistent that Jekyll did not care about but 11ty had little fits over. For example I had markdown files that were both ".markdown" and ".md" that I could have accounted for in the config but I took the issue as an opportunity to settle on ".md" everywhere. The tag system similarly had slight differences resulting in breaking the build and building duplicate similar tag pages. Here again I standardized the input to resolve the issues.
The og-image creation I had for Jekyll was a custom plugin I wrote in ruby and I have not ported it over for the new 11ty site. Instead I wrote a Nunjucks file that gets close but is not quite equivalent. I did have some issues with Nunjucks files and getting the og-images to be created but that is mostly solved now. One thing that is left lingering is the inclusion of images in that new og-image which I did not get resolved before putting it into production.
Most of the pages have been converted but I did opt to remove some temporarily while I figure out if I want them going forward. This process took longer than I anticipated but I think I have learned a bit. There were some limitations I did not expect so there will be changes going forward to try and fill in some gaps the conversion created.
Anything to distract from wriging something new here I guess. Anyway this post changes that and I hope to have more frequent posts now that things are a bit more settled on the build side.
This is day 10 of 100 Days To Offload.
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