Hello world. Hello blog.

— 2 minute read

Lately I've been researching a lot of static site generators such as: Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo and also Eleventy.

I was already quite familiar with Jekyll due to the fact the tech blog of my ex business unit (JWorks) at Ordina is using Jekyll, but as it grew it got really slow at build time and so I started looking at other static site generators.

Hugo

Hugo is blazingly fast at build time and has no dependency on JavaScript to display content to the visitor since it's just plain old HTML and CSS. Something I personally prefer over being dependent on JavaScript. It's based on Go lang and uses markdown by default. It's possible to use other formats through external helpers but it is limited.

Gatsby

Gatsby on the other hand is also fast at build time but requires JavaScript (not taking into account SSR) to present content to the visitor. It's based on React and can do some extra tricks such as using GraphQL to pull in data from other platforms, act as a PWA by default and so on.

Eleventy (11ty)

I've ended up setting up this blog with Eleventy. Lately I've been noticing a lot of buzz around 11ty and wanted to know what it was all about. After setting it up from scratch (really, easy!) and fiddling around with some starters I've ended up with the starter Andy Bell* made, named Hylia. Eleventy also uses markdown as default, but other options are available.

This blog is deployed on Netlify and uses Netlify CMS to manage the content and make the publishing experience a lot more convenient. I'm really liking it so far and I'm amazed by the amount of options that are available.

Hello blog

So, here's to a new and hopefully lasting blogging future. I've had some personal websites in the past of which one included a blog. But I've never had the drive and courage to keep them alive.

* Andy is amongst some people I've been following for quite some time within the front-end world and he does amazing things.