Posts tagged 'eleventy'

An impressionistic painting of a barefoot woman in a flowing white dress hanging laundry on a rooftop clothesline in a sunlit city. White sheets billow in the breeze around her, with one purple garment draped over the line. Warm afternoon light casts long shadows across the rooftop, while brick buildings and smokestacks fade into the hazy urban background.

Cleaning House: Refactoring My Eleventy Config Into Modules

May 15, 2026 · 2 comments · #eleventy #javascript #technical #web development

How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way.

Three jockeys race side by side on horseback in a flat racing scene rendered in a bold graphic illustration style. The horses—one dark, one white, one dark bay—surge forward at full gallop against a vivid coral-red background. The jockeys lean low over their mounts' necks, dressed in racing silks and caps. The palette is limited to deep teal-black, white, gold, and red, the image has the feel of a vintage screen-print/linocut poster.

I Made My Eleventy Build 5× Faster with Five Changes

May 11, 2026 · 1 comment · #eleventy #javascript #technical #tutorial #IndieWeb #personal site

A walkthrough of how I audited my 11ty build benchmarks and cut cold-start time from 14 seconds down to 2.6 seconds by caching two custom filters and swapping out a bare network fetch.

Screenshot of the JavaScript file (main.js) open in a code editor, showing a function called initCopyButtons that adds 'Copy' buttons to code blocks on a webpage. The file is part of the brennan.day 11ty project, visible in the left-hand file tree. The code targets pre and code elements, creates button elements with clipboard functionality, and includes a fallback for older browsers using execCommand. The status bar shows the file was last committed by Brennan Kenneth Brown.

Building brennan.day Part Two: IndieWeb, New Features, and Three Months of Iterations

March 13, 2026 · 3 comments · #eleventy #IndieWeb #personal site #technical

What have I added to my site since I started in December? Quality-of-life improvements, new pages, interesting features, and of course, easter eggs! When you add a little each day, it really adds up.

A red-tinted photograph of a graffiti-covered urban street corner, featuring a fallen bicycle leaning against a building. Bold white text overlaid on the image reads: 'Build Awesome's Kickstarter is Cancelled.' with the URL 'https://brennan.day' below.

Build Awesome's Kickstarter is Cancelled

March 6, 2026 · #Eleventy #Static Site Generators #Open Source #Web Development #Community #Kickstarter

After only a couple days, Build Awesome's Kickstarter has been cancelled and rescheduled due to email delivery issues that ruined the project's momentum despite reaching their funding goal in a single day.

A green-tinted photograph of an abandoned industrial warehouse with overgrown vegetation, crumbling brick walls, and a glass skylight roof. Bold white text reads 'The End of Eleventy.' with the byline 'Brennan Kenneth Brown' beneath it.

The End of Eleventy

March 4, 2026 · 4 comments · #Eleventy #Static Site Generators #Open Source #Web Development #Community

Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same mistakes that killed Gatsby and Stackbit—and misunderstands who actually builds static sites.

Three different blog themes side-by-side. Left: 'Indiepaper' a minimalist dark theme with white text featuring an article about the IndieWeb for writers. Center: 'Daily Chronicle' a traditional newspaper-style layout with serif typography and colourful illustrations. Right: 'brennan.jp.net' a Japanese language site with bright blue and red accents, featuring a blog post about Hugo static site development with preview images and Japanese text

Announcing Three New Free JAMstack Blogging Themes

February 7, 2026 · #Web Development #IndieWeb #JAMstack #Open Source #Blog Themes #Hugo #eleventy

I've spent the last few weeks working on three new free themes for IndieWeb blogging: Indiepaper, Newsprint, and brennan.jp.net, all of which centre around giving people a place to call their own on the internet.

Creating an Alphabetical Tag Page feat. Nunjucks Pitfalls

January 22, 2026 · #Web Development #eleventy #Nunjucks #technical

I transformed a messy tag list into an organized alphabetical sections, and there were a surprising amount of gotchas I encountered along the way.

A quill pen rests upright in an open black ink bottle on a wooden table, with a handwritten letter on parchment paper lying blurred in the background.

Posting to Your Static Site with Quill and Micropub

January 13, 2026 · 1 comment · #eleventy #IndieWeb #netlify #technical #tutorial

After building an IndieAuth comment system, I wanted to complete the loop by posting content to my site from an external client. Here's how I implemented a Micropub endpoint for my static site using Quill as the client.

A terminal window showing the Lynx web browser displaying a text-only version of a website, with ASCII art and links numbered for keyboard navigation.

Respecting the No-JS Choice: Making Your Site Work for Everyone

January 12, 2026 · 1 comment · #css #eleventy #javascript #technical #accessibility

Gracefully degrading my site for no JavaScript, including the CSS-based .no-js approach, testing with Lynx, and creating an informative experience for all users.

Google Lighthouse performance report showing a score of 83 out of 100, with metrics including First Contentful Paint at 2.6 seconds, Largest Contentful Paint at 2.8 seconds, Total Blocking Time at 30 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.192, and Speed Index at 3.0 seconds.

From 65 to 83: Attempts at Performance Optimization

January 10, 2026 · #css #eleventy #javascript #technical

A humble look into the performance optimizations boosting my Lighthouse score from 65 to 83, including critical CSS, layout shift fixes, and image optimization while maintaining the site's design and user experience.

An animated GIF of my site's post graph with clickable links and hover tooltips showing article titles.

Extending the Post Graph Plugin: Adding Clickable Links and Tooltips

January 9, 2026 · #eleventy #javascript #technical

A technical walkthrough of how I extended the eleventy-plugin-post-graph to add clickable links and hover tooltips showing article titles.

Black coffee mug on a desk displaying white text that reads 'COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED' in a playful handwritten font. The mug sits in front of a laptop keyboard with a monitor visible in the background, creating a typical home office workspace setting.

Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site

January 6, 2026 · 10 comments · #eleventy #IndieWeb #javascript #netlify #technical #tutorial

A journey through authentication, CORS issues, and the joy of owning your comments! Learn how to build a comment system for your static site using IndieAuth and Netlify Functions, storing the comments in your git repository.

The encoded letter of Gabriel Luetz d Aramon after 1546, with partial deciphering. An example of a commonplace book.

auld lang syne: The Commonplace (micro)Log

January 2, 2026 · #eleventy #personal essay #technical #tutorial

A simple gratitude journal online, with media tracking and Beeminder integration. Yes, yet another 11ty project technical write-up, but I promise you'll learn something.

A retro Windows 95-style desktop screenshot showing three open windows. The center window titled 'NeoCities 11ty Converter' features a cheerful cartoon orange tabby cat wearing a yellow hard hat and holding a wrench and paintbrush.

Deploying An Eleventy Site to NeoCities with GitLab CI/CD

January 1, 2026 · #cicd #eleventy #IndieWeb #neocities #technical #tutorial

A guide to automatically deploying your Eleventy static site to NeoCities using GitLab CI/CD, including authentication, error handling, and optimizations.