11ty

For two days I have been migrating my blog from Hugo to Eleventy via the markdown pages, and the photos via Ghost Export for Wordpress. In the process I achieved a goal, and then AI broke things, so I achieved them again, and then AI broke them again.

The favourite thing for Ai, and Gemini, in particular to break was the logic that took the markdown titles, matched them to a json file, and then helped 11ty marry the photo with the correct post. When it worked it was brilliant, but when it broke I would spend half a day trying to fix it. By the third time this happened I decided to ask Gemini to help me write a script to hard code the image path straight into markdown pages.

I currently use Hugo as a static blog. Before using Hugo I had tried with 11ty and failed because I couldn’t find documentation that suited my contextual understanding. It’s after a lot of trial and error that I eventually chose to experiment with, and then stick with Hugo since 2024 or earlier.

The reason for this is that once I found the tools to migrate from Wordpress to markdown, suited to Hugo, and found a theme that worked, I could blog with relative ease.

For weeks, or even months, by now I have been playing/experimenting with Hugo, 11ty and other solutions. I really like that with Hugo I can use FrontMatter as a CMS to create new posts, add the appropriate meta data, and keep track of what is published and what is in draft form. It allows me to create posts with the right metadata in seconds, rather than having to write the date, time, draft status and more by hand. It also generates the right file title for good archival practices.

I have spent several days playing with Eleventy and trying to get it to behave as I would like to and over the last day or two I succeeded, to some degree. Eleventy, like Hugo, is a static website generator. Whereas Hugo is built on Go Eleventy is built on Javascript. In so far as I can tell they’re both working at around the same speed.

Appearance

This blog post is written, first for Hugo, then transferred to my wordpress blog and maybe, in third place it will be added to my eleventy blog experiment. One of the key differences that I see between eleventy and Hugo is how themes work. With Hugo you choose a theme and it is applied to the entire site. With Eleventy you can create a specific layout for each website section along with it’s own css and more, so it is more modular. Yesterday I was experimenting with CSS and eventually I got it to work, but following the instructions for a css file called “bundle” rather than “style” or similar theme name.