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.