Saturday WebDev Diary

(First in a series?)

I’ve been spending a bit of time this week, and a few hours this afternoon, messing around with Eleventy, a piece of website building software that looked like it might match my needs and my capacities. I’m still not sure but it’s not been harmful to my fatigue so far.

As with many veteran bloggers I’ve found myself dabbling in template modification and building with varying levels of success over the decades. I am by no reasonable definition a programmer but I can decode an if/then or while statement and edit to do something slightly different, which is usually good enough. And while my CSS skills are basic they get the job done on a superficial level.

My imperial period was probably the early-mid days of Wordpress themes, back when a little bit of PHP and CSS could go a long way. I have fond memories of the TwentyTen default theme which could be wrangled in all manner of ways with not much danger of completely fucking it up. After a while I hit my limit and swore off web design just before everything changed. Next time I looked everything was in Ruby or whatever and there was stuff like SASS which made no sense along with far too much Javascript for my liking.

But occasionally I’d dabble. I’d come across Jekyll, a static site generator which promised to be very basic. And indeed it was. The art.peteashton.com website was built on Jekyll nearly a decade ago and was fun to put together. I gave it an update in 2024 and then, when I was scanning all those zines in an effort to settle my fevered brain into accepting it needed to rest, I set up another little Jekyll website to record my progress. It was the sort of project that would have been way too much had I planned it out, but by working on it for a few hours each week it quickly grew into thousands of pages.

The underlying code was a mess of course as I’d quickly reached the limited of what Jekyll could do for me, mostly because it’s no longer under development and struggled with basic stuff like tags and categories. Eleventy seems to have been crowned as its successor, hence why I’m trying it out.

The thing is, I have scars. Back when I thought I was a digital artist (and not just an artist who happened to use computers sometimes) the potentials of coding seemed so great, but the reality was infuriating nonsense. Open source promised the world and delivered infinite errors. Meanwhile closed source was on the road to what we now call enshitification. There’s a reason I got into composting. A pile of rotting vegetation is as interesting a system as anything a computer can give me and is way less frustrating.

So I have terms for this engagement. The software I use need to be flexible enough for my to do the things I want and need to do, but accessible enough for me to not get triggered into a stress headache and fatigue crash.

Eleventy was doing really well on both fronts. I’ve exported my blog posts from Ghost (I like Ghost but I can’t justify paying for it anymore so need to be off by the spring) and spent the week editing the files to spec. Nice busywork to keep my brain happy and learn how this software works.

Then today I tried editing the default template and discovered that Eleventy deals with images in a rather complex way. The purpose is to optimise them, which is reasonable I guess, though I’m not expecting too much traffic. The result is I have no fucking idea where my images are going and why they now have different filenames. I could feel the bile rising as I cursed the programmer caste for their needless (in my low-traffic case) nonsense, which was a good sign to step away and start again. There’s probably a simpler way using a simpler template, or I should just build my own from scratch. Keep it simple.

My goal is to have a website generating system that is analogous to zine production in the 1990s. Back then I didn’t know how to fix or modify a photocopier’s workings. My skill was in knowing what it needed to produce the required output. My layouts were constrained by the size of the paper and my skill at laying stuff out on it. Everything else was up to me to figure out. And more importantly I didn’t need to know how to prep a magazine for an industrial printing press and arrange newsstand distribution. Modern web development assumes you’re getting millions of hits. I’ll be happy if I get a few thousand.

I want to get to the stage with Elevently where I’m able to muck about with templates and CSS to produce something that feels good to me and serves my needs while not getting in the way of the important work of writing and publishing.

I’m giving myself til Xmas. One step at a time.

• RIP Jason Arday — “When people talk about the need for Black Excellence I counter with an insistence on Black mediocrity: the right for black people to be as average, flawed, compromised & mistaken as any other group of people. The right, ultimately, to be human." - Gary Younge, Pigeonholed
• Unforgetful — A reminder app by Marco Arment designed around his ADHD. $20, so I probably won’t be trying it, but his story of how and why he developed it is interesting.