Tobias Williams

What is eleventy?

11ty is a simple static site generator that can use multiple templating languages to generate pages using markdown.

Why did I use eleventy?

I am lucky to work on sites all day, for the last few years this has been drupal based. However when it comes to maintaining a full drupal install for my personal site seemed a little bit of overkill. With an eye on using the best tool for the job I have tried a couple of solutions.

First I went to a service that was either wix or something like it, I can't recall. This was a decentish solution, in that it was easy for me to set up, and move things around however there were limitations. If I didn't want to pay for a theme, which I was already at $30 a month, my options were limited. At first I thought I was ok with this, but as my time went on, I found that I was just getting annoyed with the arbitary style choices made and lack of flexibity.

So where next? My requirements through trial and error appear to be:

• Easy to maintain and update.
• Flexible for styling.
• Lower cost of hosting.

From here, my plan was to look at Gatsby and their new admin interface. When I mentioned this to a work colleague they pointed me at eleventy. Reading through the docs I expected to be put off by some minor workflow issue, however I was really impressed by how straight forward the process it was. Following these steps I was able to spin up a simple site.

In the next post, I will talk about how I went about making the simple process more complicated... because it seemed like fun.