Issue 15 - Crossing the 700 post mark, adding giscus commenting, Fathom Analytics, and the Eleventy Meetup

Aug 11, 2023

3 minutes to read

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Welcome to Issue 15 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.

We've got 7 new posts since the last issue. We're over 700 posts now.

I've added giscus commenting to these blog posts. So if you have a GitHub account, you can comment here. Hat tip to Bryce Wray for the inspiration. Though I have not used his details/summary approach to reduce javascript loading until necessary. I may change my mind later. Baby steps. In the mean time, please leave a comment if you're moved to do so.

[UPDATE: 11-01-2023]: I have removed the giscus comments on the blog posts. Since adding them back in August, I have received one single comment (thanks Bryce) on any of the blog posts. In the interest of less javascript, they are hereby vanquished.

I've also added Fathom Analytics to the site (heads up, that's a referral link that I could potentially benefit from). Hat tip to Simon Cox for the recommendation. I had previously enabled Netlify analytics (for $9/mo...per site) to see how the site was doing. Since moving to Fathom, and digging a little deeper into Netlify analytics, it seems that the Netlify numbers were dramatically overstating actual user visits. I'll write up my findings in a future post. But for now, I'm happy with Fathom. While it's $14/mo, I can add it to up to 50 sites...I've already put it on 5 of my sites. And they have a pretty cool "all sites" dashboard view.

And last, but far from least, the next Eleventy Meetup is scheduled for August 17th. The two talks will cover Intelligent Indexing using the Pagefind search library, and How Raymond Camden built his Now page.

Until next time...which, with more summer travel in store, might be a little while.

Recent releases

Posts from around the web since the last Bundle issue

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

• Previous post: Issue 14 - Last week's BIG announcement, most of Raymond Camden, closing in on 700 posts, and a bunch of sites
• Next post: Issue 16 - Birthday happened, CloudCannon config & CMS, esif.dev, 13 new posts, 10 new sites, a new starter, and more vacation