11ty...?
I've read a few blogs that are created using 11ty Static-Site-Generator. So I thought I'd take a look at it myself.
I've hand-written a lot of html over the years, my idea of a website is still a static site of hand-written HTML, so what's a Static Site Generator going to do for me?
Well.... it's a lot (a LOT) of complicated functionality that takes hand-written material (generally in simple markdown) and sorts out all the fancy HTML so you don't have to. Makes it quick to spin up a new version of a website when you add or change a page, without having to manually update all the hyperlinks and indexes etc. Sounds delightful.
After following a few tutorials and using git-cloned examples of 11ty blog setups I've decided Life's Too Short to delve much deeper into it. It is an attractive idea to use 11ty to generate my blog, and make it as simple as possible but to get just the right amount of functionality means a fair amount of effort - and my intention with blogging wasn't to get involved with the nuts & bolts of the software - to make running a blog the hobby. It was to make writing a blog the hobby. I have enough little niche geeky pastimes. Learning 11ty isn't going to be one of them, at the moment.
I still like the ability to make a simple "text and a few pictures" blog - and perhaps one day I'll bite the bullet and create one manually by writing everything by hand, like the old days, but for now I think I'll stick with Chyrp-Lite, which seems to be a happy medium. Not too complicated to use, but still with some options to streamline it.
I particularly like the setup of ldstephens weblog as an example of 11ty in action and also Hoagie's Corner of the Internet as another static-plain-text-kind-of-blog (I don't think it's built with 11ty)
Update 26 Feb 2026
I discovered Pure Blog shortly after I'd decided 11ty wasn't for me.
It does all I wanted to achieve with 11ty so I've started setting it up
Installing Pure Blog --- still a work in progress, but it's now live on my main server at Make It Tea