mtsknn.fi

My little personal website / blog. Visit it 👉

• 🎈 A static site, built on Eleventy.
• ⚛ Layouts written with Preact and rendered to static HTML when the site is built (→ zero runtime JavaScript from the layouts).
  • 🐶 Layouts were previously written with Pug. See PR #21: Replace Pug with Preact.
• 🌬 Styles written with Tailwind CSS. (Yelp, I'm still stuck on v1!)
• 💠 Running on Netlify (for free!).
• 👐 Open source: MIT License.
  • ⚠ Content files (blog posts etc.) are not openly licensed. They are © me and reside in a separate, private Git repo.
  • This project doesn't aim to be a generic template for Eleventy sites, but it's open so anyone can learn from it.
  • I'm not looking for pull requests, but please do open an issue if you found a bug or have questions or comments!

Running locally

If you are not me

1. Run npm install to install dependencies.
   • Version 14+ of Node.js is required because it's the minimum version that supports the optional chaining operator.
2. Run git rm .gitmodules content/ and git mv _sample-content/ content/ to use the sample content as a starting point.
3. Optional: run git commit -m 'Setup initial content' to commit the previous step's changes.
4. Run npm start and open http://localhost:8080/.

If you are me

Hi me!

1. npm install
2. git submodule update --init
3. cd content && git checkout master
4. cd .. && npm start

The content that I have written is in a separate, private Git repo. It's private so that I can store drafts and scheduled posts there (and fix embarrassing typos and mistakes without anyone having to know about them afterwards!). Plus the content files are not openly licensed (they are © me).

Creating new content

• Blog posts: content/blog/
• Blog post drafts: content/blog/drafts/
• Top-level pages: content/ + you probably want to update utils/navItems.js

Folder structure

• 📂 _sample-content/: Sample content to get you started. See the "Running locally" section for how to use these files.
• 📂 _site/: Development/production build created by running npm start/npm run build.
• 📂 .github/workflows/
  • 📄 main.yml: Configures a GitHub Action that makes a daily Curl request to Netlify's build hook. This enables blog post scheduling. See my blog post How to trigger daily Netlify builds using GitHub Actions.
• 📂 assets/
  • 📄 css/main.css: Processed by Tailwind when running npm start or npm run build. The result is outputted to the _site/ folder.
  • 📄 favicon/*: The files are copied as-is to the _site/ folder.
• 📂 components/: Preact components, used by layout files (which are also Preact components).
• 📂 content/: Eleventy's input directory. The default is the root folder, but having the input files (i.e. the content files) in their own folder makes things clearer.
• 📂 data/: Eleventy's directory for global data files (the default is _data). All files are JavaScript data files and automatically available in content files (Markdown). Place stuff here instead of in utils/ if you need the stuff in content files (Markdown).
• 📂 eleventy/: Eleventy's config files, required by the top-level config file (.eleventy.js).
• 📂 layouts/: Eleventy's directory for includes (the default is _includes).
• 📂 utils/: Utils, helpers and such. Place stuff here instead of in data/ if you don't need the stuff in content files (Markdown).
• 📄 .eleventy.js: Eleventy's config file.
• 📄 .eleventyignore: Eleventy's ignore file.
• 📄 .env.example: Example environment variables used to get most visited blog posts from Plausible Analytics.
  • If you don't use Plausible Analytics, you can ignore this file.
  • Otherwise you can copy and save this as .env to set local environment variables. You need to set the environment variables to Netlify too (or wherever you are hosting your site).
• 📄 .gitmodules: Specifies a Git submodule pointing to my private Git repo which contains all content. You don't need this unless you want to have a similar setup.
• 📄 netlify-setup.sh: A script needed in Netlify because the Git submodule points to a private Git repo. Blog post about this coming soon™.
• 📄 netlify.toml: Build and redirection configurations for Netlify.

Deploying to production (Netlify)

1. Run npm run build
2. ???
3. PROFIT!!

Heh, that's how it quite much feels since setting up the site on Netlify was so easy. I don't even remember what I did since Netlify did most of the job.

Just follow Netlify's good documentation and instructions. Deploying to Netlify is easy.

If you are dealing with Git submodules (hi me!), check out info about Git submodules on Netlify Docs.

License

MIT © Matias Kinnunen

Note that content files (blog posts etc.) are not openly licensed. They reside in a separate, private Git repo.