Switched to Eleventy (11ty)
Yep, that's right! But why?
Why did I switch to 11ty?
Familiarity with Javascript/Typescript
I love how configurable Eleventy is using JS. While I am skilling up in Ruby on Rails which is somewhat helping me get better at Ruby, which Jekyll uses, I only need a static site for my personal website. I already have a decent familiarity with JS/TS and being able to configure how builds and templates work using a language I am very comfortable in was super helpful.
More content type options (liquid, nunjucks, markdown, html)
In addition to MD + HTML with liquid syntax, 11ty supports additional templating languages like nunjucks, which is pretty neat! In general, this can probably be summarized just fine as "11ty is VERY flexible".
Helpful Image Plugin
@11ty/eleventy-img is VERY cool. At build time, images are optimized (or downloaded from remote sources and optimized). Should be nice and speedy to load images from the site with this, without having to build/maintain my own image optimization pipeline.
Try Something New
I have an addiction - when I hear about a new framework or tool, I need to try it out. Eleventy is not new, but it is new to me, and once I heard about it, I needed to try it. This is probably the reason with the most weight behind it.
What do you think of Eleventy vs Jekyll? Both have their ups and downs! Comment below or reply on Bluesky.