New website: 2025 edition
Sun, Dec 14, 2025
This website is now built using Eleventy instead of the Perl script I wrote a couple years ago. Everything should look the same as before, except for some minor visual tweaks.
Eleventy is a static site generator like Hugo, which I've used before. However Eleventy uses Javascript instead of Go. While it uses Javascript, it outputs ordinary HTML files instead of single-page apps like Angular or Vue.
Last year I read Learning Perl. Then I made this website to practice with Perl. However, I've barely used Perl since then—lately I've been re-learning Python. The thought of using Perl to implement something like pagination didn't interest me. That's the biggest reason why I decided to use Eleventy, but it has other advantages:
- I'm more familiar with Javascript than Go or Perl
- The Github pipeline to build and deploy the website takes about 30 seconds, compared to around 5 minutes with Perl
- I can run a live web server, which my Perl script couldn't do
Through the process of implementing my website with Eleventy, I've gotten to use a number of its features:
- Collections (of course)
- Pagination
- Layouts
- Building pages from data
- Plugins (RSS)
- Computed data
- Nunjucks filters
- Shortcodes
- Passthrough file copy
- Global data
I'm curious about other features that I haven't used yet. However, I've entirely replaced my old build system, so I don't think I need any other features.
It was a short, fun project. Was it necessary considering I hadn't updated my website in a year and a half? Time will tell!