Moving my site from Jekyll to Eleventy

So, after a lot of procrastination, I decided to migrate my old site - which was based on Jekyll's popular theme - Minimal Mistakes and hosted on GitHub Pages.

While the experience of it had been great so far, it was time to move on.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Setting up a local development environment in Jekyll is painful, to say the least. (Although docker does help in that)
• I am not a Rubyist (nor a good web dev) - so customizing anything to suit my needs involved a lot of research.
• I am out of ideas and have nothing better to do.

Why Eleventy? #

Jekyll is still a good option for a static site generator. It is now quite mature and feature-complete.

However, I chose Eleventy as the new framework.

• It is lightweight & super fast.
• It is a lot more flexible and extensible, thanks to the Javascript ecosystem.
• It supports multiple templating systems out of the box (including Liquid - the one used by Jekyll)
• It is much easier for someone equally unskilled in Javascript & Ruby to build, customize and deploy.
• It feels the closest to Jekyll than other jamstack generators, yet makes it much more simple and more accessible.
• And most importantly, it's new and shiny. (Atleast for me - it has been around for a while now)

I tried my hand at other popular options - A lot of them (e.g. Next, Gatsby) are simply overkill - they involve cognitive load associated with taking care of an unnecessarily complex system when you just wanted to render some text, with some occasional images.

Migrating from Jekyll #

My earlier site was pretty small, so it was quite easy to make the move.

I started with the eleventy-base-blog template which made it even easier.

Some references that helped me in this endeavor:

• https://nicolashery.com/moving-a-blog-from-jekyll-to-eleventy/
• https://savjee.be/blog/migrating-this-blog-from-jekyll-to-eleventy/

Conclusion #

The site in its current state is quite barebones, but I can already feel the benefits.

I plan to keep it minimal but will keep on adding features and sharing my experiences alongside.

Anyhow, it was a weekend well spent 😃

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