Laying Out the Technical Vision of the Site

I am building a site for myself, in the grand tradition of software developers who really should be doing other things with their time. This site will be a place to put things I write. I assume it will also be (in the grand tradition of pretty much anyone who starts a blog) ignored 99% of the time, and the other 1% of the time it will be "I should really write something..." but not actually writing anything.

I am building this site with Eleventy.js, which I've used before and enjoy. Eleventy is a static site generator; it takes a bunch of files in a bunch of formats and smushes 'em all together into a series of HTML files (plus CSS, JS, and any assets) that can be placed somewhere useful and served up directly. There's no database, no running web application (beyond NGINX or Apache or whatever actually turns the computer into a web server), and relatively little overhead.

(As a bonus, I believe I was the first person to deploy a production Eleventy site on CloudCannon, and almost certainly the first to deploy a production Eleventy site with Alpine JS on CloudCannon.)

In the past, my process was to grab a starter project and then modify it heavily. This time I am starting from scratch. I am doing so because there are other things I should be doing instead. I am very committed to productive procrastination, as one really must be in this day and age.

In this article series, I will describe the steps I am taking and do my best to show how and why things are the way they are. The repo is public, and I'll link to commits as they happen.

Here is our broad outline, though I make zero guarantees of the order here

1. The site exists, has a homepage, and can be accessed through the browser
2. We have some posts up and they can be found by clicking around
3. There are styles!
4. The site builds and deploys to Netlify with the right domain, etc., automatically on push to the main branch
5. Code blocks have syntax highlighting
6. We handle important things like RSS, a sitemap, open-graph data (for social media embeds), proper handling of images, SEO tags, and so on
7. We can do stuff like find posts by tag, do some pagination of our posts page, go "next" and "previous" (when applicable), and so on
8. Is there full-text search? There could be full-text search
9. It'd be cool if we could string together a long series of posts into a "Part 1, Part 2, ... Part N" list that automatically gets populated at the top of all posts in that series, and it just works.
10. It'd be cool if there were the ability to (optionally) apply a table of contents to longer posts.
11. It'd be cool if CI/CD did a Lighthouse (or general A11y) audit, checked dependencies, etc.
12. Maybe a nice little CLI utility script to produce a new blog post (blank, in draft state) in the right spot
13. Footnotes? Footnotes!
14. Analytics, etc. What is the point of having a personal website if I cannot see whether or not anyone other than me visited it this year?

No idea what order I'll tackle these in. The exact order likely does not matter much, if at all.

In subsequent posts, we'll begin actually doing the work described above.