Inflatable Ink

Getting Lean and Geeky with Inflatable Ink

How I'm building this site

thinking cat

In my last post I covered some of my motivations for restarting this site -- mostly that I want somewhere to put things that I can't otherwise categorise. But I left out one crucial reason. Even though it's already my day job, I like to tinker with websites.

Since this blog will likely be a lean affair, it makes sense to go for a lean platform. Like most bloggers, I have made good use of WordPress. In fact my work site is a WordPress effort. For this little site, though, I wanted something altogether lighter. I'd rather not have to think about updates and security here and, if I write any code, I'd like to keep things simple and avoid plugin boilerplate.

So, I'm opting for a static site generator. But which one? I have used Jekyll in the past, together with the excellent Minimal Mistakes theme. But I don't know Ruby, and I don't have it on my languages-to-learn list right now. After some extensive research (an hour or so with a search engine), I've settled on Eleventy.

This is an admirably lean platform. It's written in Javascript but generates pure HTML by default. There are a hundreds of decent themes, but I have opted for the aggressively minimal eleventy-base-blog. In the spirit of tinkering, I'll add what I need when I need it. Friend and collaborator Max Guglielmino is also pitching in.

For reference, here's what the front page looked like a few days ago:

homepage screengrab

A couple of updates before this post even went live:

  1. Added some Open Graph support. If I add an og_image elment to a post's YAML front matter, the path will be included in the page's Open Graph tags (which means it should display the image prettily in BlueSky et al).
  2. As you can tell, Max has already started working on a less basic look and feel.