The journey to 11ty !

By Hanut S. Gusain on 10/27/2021

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Let's face it, I have been putting off setting up my blog and website for the longest time. I never really did much with the gawdy looking monster I created the first time anyway. So you really can't blame me for not giving it a second thought.

That being said, I started giving serious thought to redoing my website somewhere in the begining of 2020 and had my sights firmly set on Gatsby as my go to for building my spiffy new profile. Fast forward a few months and I was no where close to having anything worth uploading (No fault of the tool mind you. Gatsby is great !).

With tonnes of work on my plate managing several key projects for some top tier clients and little to no free time, it was only natural that the whole thing just sat in my Github repo for another 7 months before I finally had the courage to look at it again.

During this time though, I did get my hands dirty with Hugo, a wonderful SSG built on Go. The ease and flexibility was a breath of fresh air and I was almost certainly going to build this site with it.

As I sat down to bootstrap my project, I ended up reading a bunch of articles on SSGs as you often do and BAM - @11ty/eleventy stuck out of the pile. I was sceptical at first, but given I wanted to get up and running as soon as possible (given my prior history of putting this off, every minute was precious πŸ˜‚). So I fired up the ol' VS Code and after a tiny setup and couple of lines of CSS + some .njk files the whole damn thing was ready !

And that my dears is how I finally managed to get my website back online after a 3 year hiatus - with some ❀️@11ty.