Weekend Wrap-Up
Since this morning, I haven't had the opportunity to do any more solid work on this project, so I suppose it's more or less time to put a cap on this thing.
Whenever I've been able to snag a few minutes, I have been looking into the problem of splitting up template content across multiple areas of a layout, and the best I can tell it does seem like Eleventy wasn't really built to do that. Which actually seems kind of odd to me, that all of the unique content on a page needs to be passed over in one chunk. The best workaround I saw for this involved splitting the page's content across multiple files, which I do not love and will not be doing. I'm going to look into the idea of using HTML comments to delineate the content, but that won't be today.
Still, you figure, 90-95% of the pages on my site are just one main content block with no sidebars. It's not out of the question that I could make use of my progress with Eleventy so far to append the header and handle navigation for the majority of pages, and then hand-code everything that needs a more specialized layout. At this point, I'm just passing over a bit of front matter and the base content and getting a fully-fledged page in return. That's not nothing. I wouldn't need to alter the HTML head, fuss with navigation, or update the table of contents. You know, the parts that are easiest for me to forget to do.
But despite spend all weekend with my nose to the grindstone, I'm not quite ready to implement. Aside from the split content thing, there's a couple other minor tidbits to sort out, and I would love to generate an RSS feed too. Being able to write my posts in markdown would also be a huge plus. At some point too, I'm probably going to have to go through and edit my existing files to some extent so that they will also benefit from the changes. I'm a little discouraged that I didn't make as much progress on this project as I might have liked... but from here on out, most of it is smaller stuff I can pick at over time.
So I guess that is to say... yeah, I'd like to keep on with this and eventually go through with the conversion. The stuff I did get done, especially navigation... it's like, whoa, I don't have to mess with that anymore. That's done. And that feels pretty cool at least.
As for Eleventy itself... I can't claim I have any strong feelings either for or against it, even at this point. On one hand, it hasn't fully chased me away yet; on the other, I pretty much burnt a four-day weekend on this and still don't have it set up. I really don't think the lackluster documentation helped in this regard; I did pull most of my code snippets from the docs with no or slight alterations, but getting to the point where I could both locate the code AND understand that it was the solution I wanted was a neverending battle. Like I said on day one, the only time it considers that you might be a beginner is when it introduces you to the terminal; from then on, we're assuming you have full fluency in Liquid, a programming syntax I'd never heard of (alternately, you could use something mostly similar called Nunjucks. That said, I'll be damned if I'm learning to use anything with a god-awful name like "Nunjucks").
My friend Emily made the comment halfway through that my experience really solidified the belief that keeping on with hand-coding is going to be far less painless than implementing a static site generator. In most cases, I'd agree with this. Especially if you have a small site with only a handful of pages, or if you're the type of person who delights in varying the designs of each page, this definitely isn't going to be for you. Or if you just love the craft of hand-coding. Part of me still does; it's just that the other part of me is trying to claw for any little scrap of time I can find anymore. I guess maybe we'll check back in six months from now and see how I'm feeling.
If you liked this, or if you want me to keep posting progress updates, let me know. I tried very hard to not turn this into a straight "tech talk" section, because I find developer blogs very off-putting due to how esoteric they are. But I figure, a lot of y'all are also small web creatives who might be curious about this sort of thing... so hopefully it was helpful to some extent.
You want to chat with me about this or anything, feel free to shoot me an email. I don't know much, but always happy to lend some input.