11ty wasn’t right for me
In 2022 I migrated to 11ty, a flexible static site generator. I thought it perfect but I was wrong and it took four years to recover 😪
Let’s be clear, my last post on this was true: I loved deploying 11ty. It was 100% right to move to a SSG, exfiltrate the content from a claggy database into markdown files, twisting the excellent markdown-it library to handle a decade of custom tags and weird oddities, and 11ty Just Kinda Sorta Worked™. A quantum leap from the rigid Django system I’d been using since 2010.
My elation masked the ugly bits, until they got in the way.
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Collections (posts) are very light and accessible on the surface and filtering and paging are both possible. I never managed to do both at once. I tried to unpick the code, understand what Zach was doing, but it was beyond me, the documentation and the support available at the time.
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Asset/design management was explicitly your job. There’s no Vite or Webpack. You can manually pass your output files through processors, but nothing was there to pick up after you. I thought it was cool but quickly realised I much prefer having access to sourcemaps and not having to recompile design files manually. Edit You can now use Vite.
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Nunjucks is the core templating language, similar to Django’s, it was quick for me to pick up but every its dissimilarity and quirk felt like a limitation.
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Trying to fix these things was painful. Zach is only one guy, there are still only ~110 other contributors. It’s a really tight team with a cult following and that made getting enough support impossible.
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The v2 upgrade broke me. I tried –I really tried– but I couldn’t make my site work on v2. I reached out but nobody could untangle my problem and so I did the only thing I could: I gave up.
The shame of being stuck on a platform I’d just eulogised for contributed to my stopping writing altogether. Not a sole cause, by any means, but every time I opened the site to write, all I could see was stuff I needed to fix.
The lesson of the story isn’t Astro
Wait, this incomplete pile of complaints is a lesson? Didn’t I move to Astro? Well, yeah, but it’s okay that 11ty didn’t work for me. I’m not angry at Zach & co. — they helped me as much as they could with a system that I’m sure does what they need. They owe me nothing.
I failed but I didn’t Fail Fast.
I knew four years ago that 11ty wasn’t working for me. Rather than shop around, I convinced myself that I’d fix it one day. It was a perennial project for another day. In putting it off, I nearly ruined one of my favourite hobbies. I missed every cue to correct these oversights, and lied to myself that I’d come back to it.
As a three time platinum-selling parent, a key skill is being honest about mistakes, learning from them. If you don’t accomplish this cycle, you get stuck in ruts. The longer it goes on, the more peripheral damage.
This site does run Astro now. It took a heck of a lot of work to port my Markdown code over, and indeed was only just made possible this year inside Astro. Maybe I’ll write about it one day.