A Fresh Start

Welcome to the new place! Take a look around! I hope you like what you see. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working diligently on a new personal website. I’m pretty excited about what I came up with.

I build the site with Eleventy. It’s my second ever Eleventy project, and I’m sad I hadn’t tried it earlier! A few weeks ago, @hankchizljaw launched his Learn Eleventy from Scratch course. I bought it on the first day because I was so excited to learn. If you’re at all interested in learning Eleventy, I wholeheartedly recommend the course.

Before Eleventy, Jekyll was my static site generator of choice. As with all SSGs, they’re simply a tool. There are pros and cons of everything, but I’m pretty happy with how easy and flexible Eleventy is. It feels like Eleventy is a lot more barebones than Jekyll is, but the positive spin of that, at least for me, is that the details get to be filled in by me.

A perfect example of this is filters. Whereas Jekyll has quite a few filters built-in, writing my own was something I was never able to figure out. I wrote several custom filters for Eleventy with absolute ease.

The other exciting part is how easy Eleventy makes it to work with external APIs. I’ll write about the specifics of that later, but I’m doing some fun things with the Last.fm API and a package for Letterboxd to bring in my film diary and my recently played music for the home page. I’m excited that this data will hopefully give people more insight into the person I am and the things I like.

I still have quite a few things on my todo list, but I was anxious to get this shipped. You can find the code for this site on GitHub. If you encounter any bugs, please let me know.