On scraping together
by Rory Green
It has taken an embarrassingly long time to get this site together. I recently renewed this fantastic domain so it means at least a year since I threw up a landing page and made tentative plans to redo this as an actual website.
The trouble is, I love to tinker. Give me something to make or do, and I'd like to spend some time wading through the options. I think this is doubly so with web dev stuff, because there has just been an explosion of front-end tools, frameworks, and libraries over the past five or six years.
For a long time, I have been trying to make this site using Gatsby. There's a lot to love about it! Unfortunately, as someone with extremely basic JS skills learning React was waaaaaaay out of my league. I had a nice boilerplate site to work from, but making small tweaks to the layout took hours.
This afternoon I instead opted to use Dan Urbanowicz's Eleventy Netlify Boilerplate and in 3-4 hours I have done what took months to get only 80% through with Gatsby. Where React threw up so many roadblocks, Eleventy has let me draw on the morsels of CSS and JS I know to scrape together something I like. I haven't spent a great deal of time looking through Eleventy's docs or use-cases but I'm sure it will be fine for lil old me.
P.s. I'm not entirely sure what I will primarily write about on this site, because I have a lot of interests I would like to casually blog about that probably don't overlap. I feel like overthinking this, however, would be unnecessarily pedantic about a space that I have control over! Ah, to express your thoughts online.