Migrating my private site to a statically generated site powered by Eleventy

Offline-first for the Win!

Started a couple of weeks ago with refactoring my private site from an Apache Server-Side Includes organized site to a more modern and flexible statically generated website powered by Eleventy.

I've moved the contents of my archived Jekyll blog here as well. Some of my Gopher articles and Gemini posts were also moved to this site.

Being able to write pages and posts using Markdown is really the best way to go for me. I even get "free" HTML previews using the "Visual Studio Code" preview window. Helps me avoid writing spelling errors and proof-check my sentences. I have the bad habit of typing too fast and not really reading what I just wrote.

Including all of the above, I've retired the obsolete now.johanbove.info page as I wasn't updating it anyway. Visiting that link will now bring you to this "plans" section.

My personal site is now easily transferable to any web host, even hosting mirrors of the site's content on IPFS and Hyperdrive is now really easy to do with little effort. It could even work on the sneaker-net on an USB stick if necessary. This was also possible with the Jekyll powered blog, but the compilation using Ruby was just a bit too cumbersome and much slower than using Eleventy and I understand JavaScript better than Ruby, so in case something breaks, I can fix it myself.

(I would need to verify the relative paths and permalinks to make sure this works)

The source code is available on this public repository on Github.

No more hassling with servers and programming languages, except for the ubiquitous JavaScript and some new templating frameworks (Nunjucks), has been enlightening and refreshing.

There could be some quirks and things that look off; this site is an ongoing experiment, like any good personal site should be.

The Webmentions integration was heavily influenced by Max Böck and Sia Karamalegos.

See this great tutorial on how to integrate Webmentions into an Eleventy site.