Lately, I've had inspiration to begin writing... again. I have a background in studying English literature in college, and have plenty of essays under my belt pertaining to literary criticism and interpretation of themes and theory in fiction. As I'm digging more and more into new web technologies though, I have a great curiosity toward technical writing, especially as it pertains to code documentation and implementation guides.
Being clear and concise is a new skill I have not utilized much other than the few posts so far of this blog, but as I contemplate writing for the internet again (it's been a year or so), I realize I would like to own and host my own content, perhaps writing about building this project itself.
Looking into potential ways to build my own blog, I found an area of web tech called static site generators (SSGs). These are build tools that take your code and instead of building a site with JavaScript (as I've loved to play with in the recent past), it breaks it all into multiple static (unchanging) HTML pages that load much quicker for the client/reader of a blog. One such SSG that seemed simple enough was Eleventy (or 11ty).
If you've found this post shortly after its publication, chances are the site you are reading it on is my own (andrewbruner.dev) and is built using Eleventy. Even after getting just a basic site started (with tailwindcss implemented in a semi-crude way), I've seen how simple and yet very customizable this little SSG can be.
Join me in future posts as I document what I learn, and build my techincal writing skills.