---
date: 2022-10-24
title: Static Site Generators
---

So my current fascination is static site generators---programs that you can
feed, for example, a set of plain-text blog files, and have them rendered
into a folder full of "static" HTML files that can be deployed directly to a
webserver with no "moving parts."

Websites made of static files are nice, both because those files are very easy
to cache for a significant speed up at load time, and because the number of
places security holes could be hiding is greatly reduced. This blog uses an SSG
called [Eleventy.js](https://www.11ty.dev/).

## Why don't you just use \_\_\_\_\_\_?

I didn't want to use a standard blog platform for a couple of reasons: first,
hosting it myself gives me ultimate control of the content I produce, forever.
I'm not interested in having someone else monetize my work with ads or
paywalls. I don't need the extra features those platforms would present to
me---I'm not worried about SEO or growing my readership; I have ADHD, and if
I'm honest with myself, I'm not sure this attempt at a blog will last any
longer than the previous ones.

Second, I like making things myself, even when I'm kinda sorta reinventing the
wheel. It may take more time, but I always give familiar skills a good stretch,
and I almost always learn something new. I find the process kinda, like...
meditative, and fulfilling, and I *love* how what I produce at the end fits me
and my process like a glove. Being able to write in Markdown in vim and save my
entire site in a [self-hosted Git
repository](https://git.alexishovorka.com/blog.git/) feels extremely comfy to
me.

And finally third, which is sort of a fusion of the previous two: doing it
myself lets me experiment much more easily. Adding a light/dark mode switch
like the one in the top right corner to a standard-issue blog template would
have taken me a lot more work. But since I designed this entire site from
scratch, it only took me a handful of lines of code that go right where I want
to put them. And all the little icons around the site---it was fun playing
around with CSS shapes again, instead of just slapping down SVGs or PNGs or
whatever.

## My Setup

The best description of my setup would be [the actual
code](https://git.alexishovorka.com/blog.git/) since it's bound to evolve at
least somewhat from anything I could write here. I'll go over some of the
trickier bits here though.

The cleanest way I found to set a default page template in Eleventy.js was to
create a file at `globals/layout.js` which masks what would otherwise have been
generated by the system up to that point. At time of writing, it's pretty
short, just one line:

```js
module.exports = "post.njk";
```

`post.njk` is the layout template file for the page for an individual post.

The same goes for the default page titles inside `globals/eleventyComputed.json`:

```json
{
  {% raw %}"pageTitle": "{{ title | safe }} – {{ metadata.title | safe }}"{% endraw %}
}
```

Figuring out the most optimal way to set up the history pages took a little
doing. What I've settled on for now is putting them under `/archive/` with
`/archive/1/` being blurbs from the first five posts (once I've written that
many, of course).

I haven't actually made the little heart-shaped "Like Post" button at the
bottom work yet, but the current plan is to make a little script that logs the
post's title to a text file and returns a 204, then when I want to get like
counts I can just do `sort likes.txt | uniq -c`. No funky injectable
databases---if there's spam, I can just delete the lines from the file and
maybe insert a little check to drop entries if there are any obvious patterns.

That's it for now, I guess? See ya :wave: