I wanted to create a new site that gets updated without me hand-coding and changing it each time. I even have posted a series of these updates here.

This has been on my bucket list for years! Time flies... but what good opportunity the last couple of months to get a wee bit of coding in (each night). It's not quite 100th Day challenge, but it was nice and at my own pace (and now I remember how addictive it can be just wanting to finish this one little bit of code).

So I wanted to try out a statically generated site framework (back to the good old days but we now have shinier tools).

I've been playing on and off with TailwindCSS (didn't have to do much with this, but it was still useful for small design tweaks). And I've heard about 11ty and netlify. I've never used Nunjucks before, and its templates looks similar to Jinja, which I like. 👍

I've made my choice, 11ty CMS and deploy with netlify.

Simples. 😆

Here's the finished page deployed and it gets rebuilt each night to pick up any changes: https://irish-diversity-in-tech.netlify.app/diversity/

And do you know what, I might as well bring in tech events as well, since I curate the Irish and Northern Irish tech events listings by hand for my monthly Coding Grace newsletters and the blog I (try to) keep updated daily. Note, I don't update this anymore since I created https://irish-diversity-in-tech.netlify.app/events/. 😎

By doing this for both, I've saved myself a bucket load of time (I hope). For years I spent many hours updating and curating in multiple places. I keep telling myself, I'll write a site to save time, it's only a couple of hours project. Well, I did say time flies and yes, I was procrastinating. I'm not the only one. 😜

So let's start from the beginning

1. Site that I can easily update in 1 place
2. Saves me time (copy and paste to newsletter, the listings update automatically)
3. Community can contribute via PRs on github
4. Saves me time to be only one updating it (*getting the hint 😉)
5. Transparency (see 3)

Please note

This post is not about creating the page from start to finish tutorial, it's more documenting what I want to do, and issues I hit across with some solutions I found along the way. I kept notes as I went along while coding using Bear.app.

TIL moments

Diversity in Tech Group Listings

Date formatting

Hmm, the dates are appearing in form of
Fri Sep 11 2020 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (Irish Standard Time)

But I want them to be 2020-09-11...

Found this simpler explanation of filters after a bit of searching:

• Down the Rabbithole: Custom filters for Nunjucks templates in Eleventy
• Other ref: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dayjs
• 11ty Rocks: Create Your First Basic 11ty Website

Sorting in Nunjucks

{% for group in groups | sort(attribute=‘name’)%}

• Stackoverflow:How can I sort by date with Nunjucks?

Moar lists stuff in Nunjucks

Was wondering if there’s anything new appending an item to a list, found this:

• Appending to a list #240

Works fine.

This created a list of only active groups

{% set up_groups = [] %}
{% for group in diversityGroups.groups %}
  {% if group.status == “active” or group.status == “new” %}
    {% set up_groups = (up_groups.push(group), up_groups) %}
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

On to my tech events listings

Moar customising date and time in 11ty

Modifying the date and time the way I wanted in my .eleventy.js filter:

• Luxon manual: Table of Tokens
• Let’s Learn Eleventy! Boost your Jamstack skills with 11ty
• Can't iterate over a global data subfolder #304
• Collections for directory indexes #502
• How to use different content dates for pages generated from data through pagination? #1249

Tis going great so far. So on Sun Jan 31st, I wanted to see if I can:

• create page to list events for that month and year
• create a listings page (test one) to list current month’s events
• create list of links to archived month listings

No way to break out of a for loop (I had to check if I missed it in the docs):

• Stackoverflow: Breaking Nunjucks Loop

Also I should have grokked this handy default 11ty supplied data page:

• Eleventy Supplied Data | Eleventy, a simpler static site generator.

Found the following to create helper functions and loaded from _data. Totes amazing save and what I was looking for.

• Dynamic footer copyright date in Eleventy - Quick Tip - Piccalilli

My next step is to refactor code so:

• I can reuse the code in the month templates
• replace the content in events/index.html with code from test.html

At this point, I got most of what I want done with the tech event listings

• main events page lists several upcoming events
• diversity in tech events
• rest of the sections like recurring events, conferences, etc. that were taken from Coding Grace events listings page, e.g. here's an example post I based it on.
• event month listings (general and diversity in tech events)

Data needs refreshing on my static site

I need to build and redeploy each night so the content is refreshed.

So I'm going to use GitHub actions as suggested by Mick:-

• GitHub Actions Documentation - GitHub Docs
• Scheduling builds and deploys with Netlify - #9 by futuregerald - Features - Netlify Community
• Schedule your Netlify build with GitHub Actions — Eric Jinks

And as someone who reads about a lot of cool tech stuff and adding it on the list of things to check out and try later (or keep that tab open in my browser 😅), GitHub actions was one of them... I didn't have any idea what to use GitHub actions for... and this wee project came along and my static site needs to be rebuilt and redeployed on a regular basis. Probably the most popular action to try out as it's the simplest.

BUT, I got it to work. I was sitting there counting down the seconds to see if the site gets rebuilt - and when it worked and again the following day (after setting it at weird time o'clock), I was happy enough to soft launch it to a few friends. 🎉

Question for the audience (who's read this far down, thank you), what do you use GitHub actions for?

Where is ma page...?

404 page needs to be implemented

• Eleventy - QUICK TIP 006—ADDING A 404 NOT FOUND PAGE TO YOUR STATIC SITE

And TA-DAA! It's done (mostly). Besides that, it was great being able to code a wee bit each night.

Folks can contribute, so I did up a quick CONTRIBUTE.md page based on suggestions from github:

• https://github.com/whykay/diversity-in-tech-ireland/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

There's still a few things I want to do like some of the following:-

• Template for requests to add/update groups, events if people don't want to do PR.
• Write a bit of logic to show new label or not for an event.
• I know there's more, but I can't think of them right now. 😉

But yeah, I'm very happy with 11ty CMS and netlify doing all the hard work deploying it for me. And it's all FREE! 🙌