Brain Embiggening
Hello internet journal, I promise I love you and haven't forgotten about you. It's just a little hard for me to figure out what I'm comfortable writing in you, since we share a space with the entire internet.
I stepped away from coding for a few months as I tend to do, and when I returned I found I'd once again seemed to absorbed a lot more information that I would have expected! I was reading some posts from a guy who does freelance work coding static sites for small businesses, and he mentioned 11ty being integral to his process.
I figure, since I'm still here on neocities and I haven't had the desire yet to figure out PHP or MySQL, why not give a static site generator a go?
First I remade my portfolio site with 11ty so I could cancel my squarespace subscription, which I'm so glad to have finally gotten to. Then I decided I liked it so much I'd do this site!
My HTML is way cleaner and easier to edit now, and I'm not using Javascript to inject HTML all over the place anymore. The entire reason I was doing that was to try to reduce repetition when, in reality, there was so much more repetition in my code than I could have imagined. As a result, my site is functional (and still looks nice) with javascript completely disabled!
I'm really happy with the results, even if it's mostly just backend stuff. My next step is probably making things look a little more fun, adding more graphics to the site... I added a subtle little pattern to the background, which I like already. (:
I also figured out how to make this blog all on my own using 11ty (as much as "myself" using a static site generator is, at least), and I think I could do my whole YiS comic section myself too when I have the energy! I always prefer to have my own code for stuff- as much as I appreciate open source code for these things, I just think it's doing things myself (and a whole lot easier to work with).
I wish I'd been building with a static site generator sooner, but honestly, I think I needed to learn how to construct web pages from scratch before approaching this step. I can't imagine ever going back, though! It's been a great reminder how rewarding learning new skills can be.