Tagged eleventy

My blog is based around Eleventy, which means I write my entries in plain text, using Markdown and YAML front matter, a combo which I'm sure is familiar to most users of static site generators.

I also participate in the IndieWeb, which means I post many different kinds of content other than your standard blog posts - notes, likes, photos, etc.

I find it useful to divide my content in two main types: original content, where the focus is on my own published material, and derivative content, which only makes sense in the context of another, external URL.

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Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

To be clear, I'm talking about receiving and displaying webmentions here, not sending them. How I ended up sending them will be a separate topic, as it is tied into how I manage POSSE and backfeeding on my site.

The previous, pelican-based incarnation of my blog used a homegrown system involving a webmention listener that handed off data to a redis server and ultimately resulted in a new webmention being committed to my site's repo, causing the whole thing to be rebuilt. It certainly worked, but it required a fair bit of maintenance. It also failed to take into account certain edge cases that I hadn't previously considered (like a commentator's avatar image going missing).

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As a participant in the IndieWeb, I publish my share of likes, replies, reposts, and bookmarks. These posts all have one thing in common - they refer to another, external URL and only make sense in the context of that URL.

This being the case, it's nice to give my readers (and myself) some sense of what I'm referring to when I post that content. The process of scraping metadata from URLs for display purposes is called "URL unfurling" and implementing it efficiently on an Eleventy based website is not entirely trivial, especially when you're trying to save your Netlify build minutes, so it's worth sharing what I've learned.

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Pagination in Eleventy is bit strange. Out of the box, Eleventy comes with support for something the developers call "pagination", but it might not be the sort of pagination you're used to.

As you probably already know, Eleventy is a static site generator. It generates output HTML files from input template files. In the simplest case, one HTML file is generated for each (non-layout) input template.

The feature known as pagination in Eleventy is basically a way of getting around that limitation, allowing you to generate multiple output files from one template file. If you squint, you can see how this maps to the traditional idea of pagination (i.e. we want to break down a long list of items into smaller sized pages, writing only one template for the page) and although this is, indeed, a common way to use pagination in Eleventy, it turns out that the feature is much more generic than you might think - and, paradoxically, less useful than you might think.

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As mentioned previously, I recently converted my website over to Eleventy. I'm an IndieWeb participant and, moreover, my website is fairly complex so I ended up writing (or, in some cases, pilfering) a fair amount of code to make it all work together in an acceptable manner. I thought I would document the process via a series of blog posts in case anyone else finds it of value.

None of this is intended to be an Eleventy tutorial and you'll get the most from these posts if you already know something about how Eleventy works.

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After roughly five years, I've finally decided to switch my blog over from Pelican to Eleventy. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't at least partially swayed by the fact that all the cool kids seemed to be doing it but, with that in mind, I do have some (hopefully) legitimate reasons for making the switch.

Pelican bills itself as a static site generator, and so it is, but one that focuses more on traditional, single user blogs. Pelican can, of course, be used as a CMS, and you can certainly use it to create arbitrary, standalone pages and websites, but the features in support of this usage seem more bolted on than organic. There are certain assumptions built into Pelican that stem from its original purpose as a blogging engine that are occasionally irritating to circumvent.

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