README

As mentioned, this site is being developed using 11ty. After learning about SSGs, I first played around with Hugo, then Zola, but 11ty was the first one I seemed to really start to get the hang of. A quick crash course on 11ty from Jayden Urwin was a big help.

I'm still very much in the learning phase with 11ty, but so far I'm really digging it. It seems fairly straightforward I think. And it seems incredibly flexible, which is really nice as well.

I believe the original release of this particular site was done with WriteFreely. WriteFreely is a great minimalist federated blogging platform which I liked, but I wanted something a bit more flexible. I then switched to TextPattern becuase I really thought I wanted/needed to have an online backend that I could log in to for updating, but I found I didn't really care for that either. Eleventy seems to fit exactly what I was looking for.

List of the things I'm currently self-hosting.

  • This Site using the 11ty Static Site Generator
  • Nextcloud, a personal self hosted cloud service
  • Miniflux, a self hosted minimalist and opinionated feed reader
  • Microblog.pub, a python based activitypub server
  • Gitea, private, fast, reliable DevOps platform

2023.12.19 Release v1.1

Changes:

  • Fixed a view small things.
  • Added back to top button.
  • Added 3 most recent posts and recipes to the home screen.
  • Added next/previous post link cards at the bottom of blog and recipe posts.

2023.12.16 Release v1.0

Changes:

  • Complete rewrite of the site CSS.
    • Switched to using oklch() instead of hex and rgb for color setting.
    • Used calc(), min(), and max() to apply some dynamic padding to various elements to allow the design to breath a bit more on larger screens , but not waste so much space on smaller screens.
    • Used some scoped nesting to isolate styles on some elements, which seems way nicer and easier than fighting against cascaded styles. This makes styling nav links and content links differently so much easier.
  • Added an Atom RSS feed for blog posts, and a separate one for Recipe Posts, linked in footer.
  • Changed the unfinished 'Site Stats' div above to 'Current Self Hosting Lineup'.
  • Made tags listed below Blog and Recipe posts on the Blog and Recipe pages individual clickable links rather then just a text string.
  • Simplified the method I'm using to add header anchor links.

2023.06.24 Release v0.3

Changes:

  • Fixed an issue with iOS that was showing a 1px gap above my footer svg. I found some info regarding a known "issue", but the fixes being suggested weren't working for me, so maybe what I was experiencing wasn't the exact same issue. Ultimately fix it (for now at least) with margin-top: -1px;, which I'm sure isn't best practice, but at least it displays properly for now. Also, forghettabout remote debugging iOS on Linux. I guess if I really want to do that my best option is to probably get a MacOS VM running or something.
  • Re-worked the search page. Duck Duck Go didn't seem to be showing any results, maybe the site hasn't been indexed yet. So I've implemented a vanilla JavaScript solution that will search through all blog and recipe post titles, descriptions, and tags. This really isn't needed on this play site I'm sure, but I wanted to learn more about how to implement a simple JS search feature.

2023.06.17 Release v0.2

Changes:

  • Added Header Anchors to Blog Posts
  • Added Recipe div, updated tags page to group tags based on blog posts and recipes posts
  • Tweaked some backend html/css a bit
  • Started on a Search page, right now it just forwards to DDG

2023.06.10 Initial Release v0.1

Initial re-release of the site. Previously the site was built with the Textpattern CMS. I have now re-written it using the Eleventy Static Site Generator.

Things to do yet:

  • Create site stats
  • Convert this div to markdown
  • Maybe add a recipe div, or I could do a special template for recipes and just organize them with tags in the blog...