As you might have noted, I took a couple of weeks from posting here. Why? Well, I decided to figure out what to do with my website. Most notable it’s backend.

You see, for a while now, I have not been happy with Wordpress. My main issue has been their push toward the block editor. I just don’t find it working well for my style of writing. It was just too cubersome and I ended switching to Markdown editor for my processing needs. Unfortunately, that is also not an ideal experience, especially because this markdown processor is not the newest beast and it often messes up a perfectly valid syntax (e.g. manually wrapped paragraphs). Of course, Wordpress’ latest scandal definitely didn’t improve anything.

And yes, this is not the first time I’m changing how these pages are generated. Before switching to Wordpress, I was running my own ASP.NET engine. Before that, I was using Blogspot. Before that, I was doing raw HTML. And there were many intermediate steps in between. It’s safe to say that every few years I look into alternatives to what I’m currently running.

This year, for the first time, I tried 11ty and… I fell in love. Interestingly, this static site generator is not a new beast. However, I somehow missed it a year or so ago when I tried Hugo and MkDocs, neither or which really worked for me.

11ty was trivial to get up working and expanding its functionality is just smidgen more difficult. Before I started, I made a list of things I wanted to work. Yes, my site isn’t overly complicated but I was surprised how easy was to get all things going.

Automatic thumbnails - a few hours to implement from scratch. Search - working within an hour (courtesy of Pagefind) albeit followed by a few hours of figuring out look&feel. Import (courtesy of wordpress-export-to-markdown script), albeit rather basic, done in an hour too. Custom scripts for calculators present on some pages, it’s markdown and just works.

Based on length of my hiatus, you can see there were many additional steps. For example, I didn’t find a theme I liked so building my own took ages. Figuring out the structure and finding the good balance in preserving links and getting new functionality took a while too. What 11ty allowed was for neither of those steps to take too long individually. There is just something special in seeing immediate progress. And it’s not as if I worked on this 24/7 since I have a daily job and I also squeezed in visiting Croatia for a week.

Now, finally, my static 11ty site is in good enough state to share it with the world. Not all is working yet, but I am comfortable enough that I can deal with rest of issues in the background.

The first thing you’ll notice is absence of comments and this is something I’ll miss the most. I simply didn’t find a good enough solution to deal with them. To replace that, I do have a “Contact” at the bottom of every page now so you can contact me. Poor replacement, but all that’s there for now. Mind you, my site never had an overwhelming number of comments. But those precious occasional discussions are gone for now.

The second issue is that not all stuff was imported correctly. Older things posts that used Wordpress shortcodes to display code got quite mangled in the process of conversion. I am working on fixing those and eventually they will be converted to a proper markdown. However, since that impacts only posts older than 2 years, I decided to simply fix that eventually instead of postponing the move to 2025.

With this engine swap behind me, normal program will continue the next week.