A friend of mine, Rogério Lino, presented WordPress to me in 2005. It was an amazing blog tool: simple, fast, and very easily customizable.
20 years later, and a dozen abandoned blogs that I've forgotten, I have created my website and professional blog. When I encountered WordPress again and tried to use it for my new blog, I found a bloated tool with excessive options, unnecessary plugins, managers, etc.
I tried to customize it as I wished, with a layout resembling old green-screen CRT monitors. I gave up quickly and decided to look for an alternative.
A few days later, I discovered 11ty (Eleventy). It is a static site generator that uses JavaScript, a template language of your choice for layout, and Markdown for post writing.
In my post about the need for an HTML replacement, I wrote that XML is dying because of plenty of better options. In the same way, Markdown is by far better than HTML for writing text. It requires less code to achieve the same result. Unfortunately, I can't get rid of HTML completely yet, but for my posts, I am now free of it.
I have created an awesome workflow for my posts (at least for me):
I write my posts in Notion, where I can keep them, make changes, add links, leave, come back, change them again until I decide I’m done. Afterwards, I ask an LLM to review my poor English grammar—it used to be better when I was a teenager. No shame in that; it would be worse to post incorrect texts. When I finish adjusting the text, I ask an LLM to create an image to illustrate the post, and it's ready to go.
Now, this is where things get really interesting. I copy the text from Notion into a Markdown file in my project along with its image. Then, I commit and push the project to the release branch on GitHub, where an Action is automatically executed. This action builds the HTML project and synchronizes the files with my hosting via FTP.
11ty also generates the sitemap, robots.txt, and RSS feed XML (🤢). I really don't use SEO tools for writing: they tend to make my posts feel unnatural. If you don't the way I write, don't read; it's my memory leakage.
For blog comments and reactions, I use a simple tool called Giscuss: this tool uses GitHub discussions to store these comments and reactions. You only need to configure the plugin to use a public repository discussion on GitHub. The readers must log in with their GitHub accounts to comment.
You may be interested in 11ty simplicity, and I really don't need to write another tutorial teaching how to use it, since they already created this guide, a 6-minute video teaching how to create a blog from scratch, and a base blog project in GitHub.
It is very straightforward, and believe me: if you want to customize it, it's easier than any current WordPress tool - yes, there are many of them, and they can be totally different depending on the theme you use.
If you are interested in 11ty, try it, create your blazing-fast static pages based blog, and share your experience in the comments below.
Originally posted in my blog
Top comments (0)