Working with 11ty

Introduction

11ty is an exciting way to generate sites, in a simple and intuitive manner!

But before, we begin, here are the links to the repositories we'll be using within this blog post!

Getting Started

There are a ton of 11ty templates out there! What I particularly recommend is trying out the general hello world template linked on their web page, and then moving to cloning one of the many great templates that exist!

I have to note though that the hello world template is a lot easier to work with as a 1st user experience (like you might expect), but once you start getting into further use, the other templates quickly prove their usefulness. Visuals are another strong area where we can see the difference in the template power. Here's a snippet of my blog posts within all three templates -- we can really see the difference!

From Scratch

This one was a doozie to get set up and working, but it looks great (except for the lack of styling) in the end!

The Base Blog

This one looks a lot better for sure, and unlike the previous one, there doesn't really have to be all that much md to html fuckery -- we can just keep things in markdown and everything will all get rendered correctly.

The Third Blog

This one has all the CSS and snazz you might expect from one of those subscription based sites, except here, you can customize it super easily and host it on your own!