Moving my site from Jekyll to Eleventy.

How I revamped my personal site.

Eleventy Jekyll

So, after a lot of procrastination, I decided to migrate my old site - which was based on Jekyll's popular theme - Minimal Mistakes and hosted on GitHub Pages.

While the experience of it had been great so far, it was time to move on.

Here are a few reasons why:

  • Setting up a local development environment in Jekyll is painful, to say the least. (Although docker does help in that)
  • I am not a Rubyist (nor a good web dev) - so customizing anything to suit my needs involved a lot of research.
  • I am out of ideas and have nothing better to do.

Why Eleventy?

Jekyll is still a good option for a static site generator. It is now quite mature and feature-complete.

However, I chose Eleventy as the new framework.

  • It is lightweight & super fast.
  • It is a lot more flexible and extensible, thanks to the Javascript ecosystem.
  • It supports multiple templating systems out of the box (including Liquid - the one used by Jekyll)
  • It is much easier for someone equally unskilled in Javascript & Ruby to build, customize and deploy.
  • It feels the closest to Jekyll than other jamstack generators, yet makes it much more simple and more accessible.
  • And most importantly, it's new and shiny. (Atleast for me - it has been around for a while now)

I tried my hand at other popular options - A lot of them (e.g. Next, Gatsby) are simply overkill - they involve cognitive load associated with taking care of an unnecessarily complex system when you just wanted to render some text, with some occasional images.

Migrating from Jekyll

My earlier site was pretty small, so it was quite easy to make the move.

I started with the eleventy-base-blog template which made it even easier.

Some references that helped me in this endeavor:

Conclusion

The site in its current state is quite barebones, but I can already feel the benefits.

I plan to keep it minimal but will keep on adding features and sharing my experiences alongside.

Anyhow, it was a weekend well spent. 😃