Austin's Blog

Rethinking my Approach

I'd like to take stock and rethink my approach to blogging, or at least, how I'm setting up my personal blog. Rather than build everything from scratch, I'm revisiting a useful tool I found a while back, 11ty. With this tool, I can customize what I need and use the templating language I want without having to code everything from scratch. Still, I'd like to explore some of the territory I was scoping out eventually.

11ty, or Eleventy, is a simple yet powerful tool for building websites. Without giving their whole spiel, you can build a blog in just a few minutes using their flexible templating and page generation engine.

I decided to start from the same template I've been using for my blog, but with a few tweaks. I want to put all my old posts under an "/archive/" namespace, and rework the blog's homepage to display the posts differently. Instead of the default "last 10 posts" view, I'd like to display my posts in chronological order, paginated with ~10 posts per page. These posts should have their first paragraph or so rendered below the post title, so the reader gets a preview of the post before clicking through.

It turns out that what I really needed was just an overhaul of what I already had. While it's exciting to hack on a page generator from the ground up, I didn't need a lot of the flexibility that would give me. In fact, most of the flexibility I needed was already in 11ty. In this specific case, why reinvent the wheel?

That said, there are some interesting problems to be solved in the space of website generation (static or no) that I don't think have been fully explored or hashed out yet. One of these days, I'd love to hack out some ideas on static site generation in particular -- I just don't think depending on that experiment as a platform for my blog is the best idea right now.

So from here, I'll be posting thoughts, feelings, and hazy notions and premonitions from this blog. My old posts will go into the archive. I'll try to log what I'm working on here, and my thought process throughout. Occasionally, I might post wider-ranging thoughts on the industry or craft of programming computers in general. Sometimes, I might rant and rave! But overall, I'd like to keep this as a space for my thoughts on tech, computing, and programming. More to come...