Issue 14 - Last week's BIG announcement, most of Raymond Camden, closing in on 700 posts, and a bunch of sites

Jul 31, 2023

8 minutes to read

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Welcome to Issue 14 of the 11ty Bundle. 11ty, aka Eleventy, is a "simpler static site generator" that is designed to be simple, flexible, and highly customizable. It is built on Node.js and allows developers to create websites by transforming templates and data into static HTML files. It supports multiple template languages, giving developers the freedom to choose the languages that best suit the needs of their project.

TL;DR Zach's now at CloudCannon. Eleventy has a future. Lots of new posts and sites. I'm back from vacation. If you want to jump to the posts...go ahead, I won't be offended.

Last Week's BIG Announcement

Well, there's some very good news on the Eleventy development front. Zach has joined CloudCannon as a developer advocate and they will be providing funding for Zach to spend time on further Eleventy development. Needless to say, the community welcomes the news.

Here's the announcement from CloudCannon: CloudCannon — the official CMS partner of Eleventy

And here are a couple of key paragraphs from Zach's video:

After surveying the Eleventy community we found the data reflected an opportunity to refocus Eleventy as a static site generator, returning to our roots and the original benefits of the Jamstack that we all came to know and love: front-end web performance, improved security by decreasing runtimes, and reducing vendor lock-in for maximum hosting portability.

We’ll use this newly sponsored development time to implement Project Slipstream, the code name we’re using for Eleventy’s simplification and rededication to the Jamstack. Stay tuned—work has already begun and we look forward to shipping our first 3.0 alpha release soon.

Here are The Eleventy Community Survey Results (2023).

It's interesting that Zach used the term Jamstack. On a related note, Brian Rinaldi recently posted a piece entitled Is Jamstack Officially Finished?. He leads off with the note that "Netlify officially killed The Jamstack Community Discord." It's worth a read.

One last note on this topic, Bryce Wray has a nice writeup about the good news for Eleventy's future.

New Posts, Most of Raymond Camden, and a New Author

I've got 11 new posts that were written since the last issue, and I've added the vast majority of Eleventy-related posts by Raymond Camden (90 of the 97). That brings his total to 90 posts on the site. I'll note that once you arrive at the posts that are more than 2 years old, he notes that at the top of his posts. He even has a post that describes how he does that.

Also, new to the list of authors is Lea Verou. She has migrated her personal site to Eleventy and discusses various aspects of how she did it. To learn more about Lea, check out her about page. I had the pleasure of meeting her years ago at a conference event for another platform, Expression Engine.

With Raymond's posts added along with a bunch of others, we're quickly closing in on 700 posts. There's a lot for the community to chew on and help everyone to deepen their understanding of how to get the most out of Eleventy.

Vacation Time is for Vacation

Having been on vacation (with my wonderful wife, energetic dog, and laptop), I began to feel that I was falling behind on adding new content to the site. I came across new and relevant posts, and the backlog of Raymond Camden's posts was weighing on my mind. On top of that, the BIG announcement mentioned above happened while I was away. I was tempted to put out a post about it, vacations are an important time to step away. I've since come up for air and have gotten caught up. I'm feeling a bit more relieved. Even though I'm retired, I can't seem to shake the sense of urgency I get when I think something needs to be done. I'll keep working on that.

Odds and Ends

This just in (on Friday, July 28), there's a new starter from Łukasz Wójcik. It's called Multiplicity - RSS Aggregator Starter Based On Eleventy. It's based on his BLOGWORM site.

With Zach's recent move to CloudCannon, I thought I'd share a link to a blog post by David Large of CloudCannon. Davis lists 11 Top Eleventy Blog Themes (Starters) in 2023. The post is from December 2022, but close enough. This same paragraph is also on the Starters page...for persistence.

For those of you who write about Eleventy and anything else, here's a post to further inspire you to continue writing. Ignore the title and keep reading. It's a good one.

And lastly, for those of you who remember back in Issue 9, what I affectionately refer to as the "rathole" issue, I have since abandoned the effort to capture blog link click data. While I did capture some data over the recent weeks, the data was less than satisfying and far too dispersed to be useful for what I had intended. That said, I can report that the Getting Started category is, by far, the most clicked category, which speaks to the continued interest in Eleventy. I am currently investigating the use of various lightweight third-party analytics packages. I'll let you know when, and if, I have something to share.

Recent releases

Posts from around the web since the last Bundle issue

Built with Eleventy

There are a bunch of new personal and business sites to share. My main source for these is tracking the 11ty-community GitHub repo. I get notified whenever Peter deHann processes the requests to be added to the list of Built with Eleventy sites. I have to say that Peter is also one of the more amazing people who answers nearly all of the issues posed on the Eleventy repo. He's a thoughtful and remarkably knowledgeable person. Thank you, Peter! And don't forget, you can add yours here.

If you want to see more sites, check out the Eleventy Leaderboards.

• Previous post: Issue 13 - Self-inflicted debugging, a boatload of Raymond Camden, and a couple of sites
• Next post: Issue 15 - Crossing the 700 post mark, adding giscus commenting, Fathom Analytics, and the Eleventy Meetup