I'm moving my blog to Eleventy

You read the title. I've migrated my site over to Eleventy, from Astro.

Backstory

First of all, I always wanted to love Eleventy (or 11ty). When I discovered it (in 2020), it was love at first sight, and I wanted to build my site with it. But that time the project was probably in the beta stage, which reflected by its 0.x version number. Docs were not arranged good enough for me, some things required deep understanding of Eleventy. I felt it's probably not for me at that stage, and then moved on. Then comes Hugo. I built my site using Hugo. It was fast, like, exceptionally fast. There were lots of themes/templates to choose from, and I got my site up within a week. But there was a problem. Hugo basically had very little opportunities for extensibility. Being written Go, which is a compiled language, there was no concept of "plugins" for it. Everything had to be done using scripting. I remember spending an afternoon to write a script to highlight code blocks using Shiki. In retrospect, it did get the job done, but it was still problematic. If I had went on, it'd been a "script hell" around Hugo to build my site.

Astro

Then comes Astro, which I got to know about in May of 2021. It was a very young project, but with a clear vision - to create static sites with on-demand JavaScript. I quickly got in contact with the awesome people making it, and had some good time. I decided to re-build my website in Astro. It was a bold move, I know, making important stuff with beta software is never a good idea. The docs were written very well, and most of the times the answer was in the docs. And the people there in the Discord server were always ready to answer my (sometimes silly) questions. During the process of writing my site in Astro, I had struggled quite a lot due to bugs, in that process I think I was of much use to the Astro community because I was helping other people with issues I faced earlier, reporting bugs on Discord, and sending a couple of pull requests on GitHub. I also implemented the draft posts feature(the @obnoxiousnerd's me btw), of which I feel very proud of myself. Astro's team also had decided to rewrite their compiler in Go, which they were successful with. With that I remember finding my website completely broken and then spending more time fixing it. It was good, the grind was good. They also selected me for their Community Recognition Award, January 2022, which counts as my first earning from contributing to open source, of which I am very grateful of. But, there's a few things which were not fitting quite well with my site with Astro, which boils down to a few personal preferences and the beta nature of Astro, as I'm writing this.

The reasons behind the change

1. Beta software. Now no one here is to be blamed for this, it's always good to be a kind of early adopter for new software. Astro, I think, is doing things the right way, or to be more precise, the way they should be. Astro, Slinkity, Remix are some of the newer tools which are doing the web things the right way, ship HTML, with JS stepping down as the second-in-line. Doing things the right way takes time, and I know it very well. The new compiler in Go unfortunately has some bizarre bug which would throw random errors even on files with the correct syntax. It was a pain to get things fixed with that.
2. Personal preferences. Astro, like Hugo or Eleventy, does not have shortcodes¹ as of now (there will be, I know it, probably I'll implement it if I get the chance), which I absolutely like to use. I was not very pleased with writing JSX-esque components in my Markdown. Also my way of writing and structuring my personal website didn't align with the structure of a typical Astro project. My code was getting clunky, and it was time to switch. Nunjucks? Boy did I missed it a lot.
3. I like the idea of Webmentions, but I was totally not sure how to implement it with Astro. Maybe if someone knows it, they must create a guide for it.

Back to Eleventy

I was checking on Eleventy after quite a few months now, and looks like they've released their first stable version! Looking at this, I check out their docs, this time its well structured and in place, and I just couldn't resist myself switching to it. Templates, Data files, all that felt like the perfect hole my plugs were not filing. The structure of my site under Hugo with endless extensibility, just what I needed. And so here we are, now.

With Astro, my website was still sturctured very good and was very modular, and that helped me migrate to Eleventy in just two days. Astro's very good, give it a try!

The future

So as it stands, I am sticking with Eleventy for now, regarding my website. But that doesn't mean it's all over for me and Astro. Astro, and its community will always have a special place in my heart, and I will continue working with Astro with some of my projects (There is already one in the works, and the folks on Astro's Discord server know about it 😉). Migrating from Astro does give me a sense of me betraying Astro, but I hope I'll feel better after rambling about this. And, I will be writing my Projects page in Astro, because I want some dynamic things in it without sacrificing static HTML! There you go, yet another case of extensibility.

Footnotes

1. In Astro, shortcodes basically means using a component written in a framework or Astro's own templating language. I'll implement them if its in the plans and if I get it done correctly. ↩