How I migrated this blog from Astro to Eleventy

2023-11-18T00:00:00Z

I know what the migration posts usually say, because I have written five of them, so let me skip the apology paragraph — (it's been a while; the redesign took longer than expected; the drafts are coming) — there, consider it skipped, and let me instead address the question my friend Eirik asked when I told him the news:

"Wait. People are migrating to Astro. Everyone is migrating to Astro. You had Astro. What is wrong with you?"

A fair question, asked with love, answered as follows.

Nothing was wrong with Astro

Astro shipped zero JavaScript and I said the platform churn was structurally over, and I meant it. But over the past year I kept noticing small things. My content schema is in TypeScript. My config is in TypeScript. The .astro file format is its own language with its own compiler — a lovely one! — that exists so my Markdown can become HTML, a transformation I have now purchased from six different vendors.

In October I got a build error inside content.config.ts. I fixed it in four minutes. But sitting there, fixing a type error in a configuration language for a blog with one post, I had what I can only describe as a moment of clarity.

Enter Eleventy

Eleventy is a static site generator that has been quietly excellent since 2018 while everything else was being reinvented. It is JavaScript-the-language, not JavaScript-the-lifestyle:

Templates are Nunjucks (or eleven other languages; it does not care).
Data is a cascade of plain objects. A post is a Markdown file. A config is a function.
There is no client runtime, no compiler, no schema, no .eleventy-flavored anything.
Build time: 1.4 seconds. RSS: an honest Atom feed, still alive. Dark mode: via prefers-color-scheme, like nature intended.

Permalinks remain /year/month/title/ — fourteen years, six engines, zero broken URLs. At this point the permalink structure is the senior-most engineer on this project.

And yes: I am aware this migration runs against traffic. The whole internet is going 11ty → Astro and I have gone Astro → 11ty, like a man walking calmly up the down escalator. But that's exactly the point. I keep migrating toward whatever feels like less, and Eleventy is the first tool that feels like almost nothing. There is barely anything left between me and the writing now. One config file. Three templates. That's it.

Next post will be the sorting-algorithms one. It's basically done. I just want to tweak the syntax highlighting first.

— Olav

Blog Title

How I migrated this blog from Astro to Eleventy

Nothing was wrong with Astro

Enter Eleventy