This site took 954 lines of code

I flipped my site again, and I flipped it back to 11ty...again. The repo is available here.

I'm much happier with the approach this time. I took the lessons from my NextJS + Contentlayer setup in my previous site to make Obsidian-sourced content work great for me. I don't have the same type safety that I had in the first "Obsidian as a CMS" approach, but I feel like I can accomplish much more with less code than I ever could with NextJS.

I added a script pnpm linecount to count the source code lines, following the approach I used in 20k-lines-of-code. I was targeting a building a site in under 1,000 lines, and I hit it!

In 954 lines (as of this commit) I was able to include:

• search
• custom layouts
• theming
• SEO customization

I'm going to split out from this barebones version of this site and leave it as a template for others if they're interested. I still need to write a README though. Then I'm going to add some ✨pizazz✨ to my version of the site.

What I liked

• Includes match the mental model of building blog sites so much better than React components.
• Many fewer levels of abstraction than NextJS. All of the building logic is in the eleventy.config.js file.
• Much more approachable for creative content sourcing. I had to transform the content twice to get NextJS to work nicely with Wiki-style links and images. In 11ty, I just have to transform it once, since collections and content sourcing life cycle hooks are core to the library.

What I did not like

• Nunjucks and Liquid are weirdly opinionated and strange to work with. For example, there is no Nunjucks filter for slicing an array, but there is a slice filter that converts a one-dimensional array into an N-dimensional one. For a DSL based on JavaScript it sure seems hostile to JavaScript developers. The times I got the most frustrated developing this site were when I was trying to figure out how to do something that should be simple in Nunjucks, like have a filter take multiple arguments. How are there not good docs on this???
• I couldn't get my current editor, neovim, to recognize Liquid, Nunjucks, or respect the JSDocs syntax well. There seems to be no proper LSP implementations of the first two, and I don't understand what's up with the second one.
• Adding JS dependencies is kind of a free-for-all in 11ty, so I wasn't sure how to handle search, the only JS dependency I needed.

Backlinks

• Almost spring, despite everything