New Site - Based on Eleventy

Published on: 06, by

I finally migrated my personal website to be a static site generated with 11ty!

I created the original website when I was in graduate school using GetSimmpleCMS which is based on PHP. In the past, I used PHP a lot, mostly because it was the most ubiquitous - and cheapest - platform to deploy a dynamic website. Now it is possible to deploy a JAM stack website very low cost - free in most cases.

I am relieved that I moved to a static site as I no longer have to worry about:

1. My site being hacked.
2. Paying for the hosting.
3. Upgrading the underlying CMS tool.

Before deciding on 11ty, I did some research on the different Static Site Generators (SSGs) Many different article on the topic ended pointing to the www.staticgen.com, which at the moment, Nextjs, Hugo, Nuxt, Gatsby, Docusaurus, and Eleventy were in the top 6 based on the number of GitHub stars. The number of stars should not be the sole factor for choosing a tool, but it is a good start.

From those 6 SSG tools, Gatsby was discarded because it was too heavy, Docusaurus was discarded because its focus is documentation, Nuxt was discarded because it's based on Vue (not that I dislike Vue, but I'd prefer React or otherwise framework agnostic altogether).

The competition was between Nextjs, Hugo and Eleventy.

• I read many good things about Hugo, primarily it is praised for its speed (Go-based). But ultimately the go-template was not my choice.
• Nextjs was promising, especially since 9.3 (3/2020) it added SSG support.

I ultimately chose 11ty for its simplicity and flexibility.

Just two days of using 11ty and so far I am very satisfied. It is flexible: supports multiple templates, and I can use any JS library in the npm ecosystem.

Future work:

• Add search with Algolia
• Add comment

Published on: 06, by