Issue 19 - From Airtable to Google Sheets...Clean up of broken links...And 8 posts and 5 sites to see.

Previous post: Issue 18 - Relocation of some WebC recipes...another source of 11ty links...and 1 release, 14 posts, and 10 sites to see.
Next post: Issue 20 - A safe landing on Google Sheets...7 million npm downloads...11tybundle site posts arrive in the docs...And 10 posts and 7 sites to see.

Oct 19, 2023

2 minutes to read

Welcome to Issue 19 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.

I did some work under the hood here, moving the data source for the site from Airtable to Google Sheets. I wrote it up on my personal site. While my first cut at this was extract a json form of the Google Sheet data that exactly matched what I was getting from the Airtable API, it has been suggested that I make use of the Google Sheets API to get the data directly at build time, rather than the method I'm now using. I'll be looking into that as it would result in a simpler build workflow.

As is often the case with content heavy sites that are based on the content of other sites, links break for one reason or another. I had been using the npm package check-html-links to check that all of the internal links work properly, but I had not recently done a check of the external links...and there are a lot of them. I did a run of dead link checker and it found a handful. These were mostly to sites that either no longer existed or blog posts that had moved or had been removed. As of right now, things are clean and I should integrate this into my site validation process...or at least do it occasionally.

Until next time...