Heyo, Welcome to My New Site!
by Bennett Dungan
I just finished rebuilding this site with 11ty and hosting it on Netlify's starter tier. This means, besides domain renewals, the cost to run this is now totally $0. I was paying something like $10/month to host my clunky Wordpress site previously. It did the job, especially when I didn't know much about web development. Now, I've transcended into semi-competency so I should reflect that with a lightweight and simplistic design to showcase my elite minimalist taste.
To build this, I cloned a nice 11ty boilerplate project and pretty much stripped it entirely of its original styling and built it from there. I love the simplicity of the file structure and code-base in general. I had to learn a bit about Nunjunks templating but besides that, it was easy breezy to build. Honestly the hardest bits were re-learning some CSS stuff I had forgotten about because I deal with mostly Reactstrap and Bootstrap classes to assist with styling at my day job. Then what took the most time was porting over all of my old blog posts. Luckily in the Netlify CMS, they translate the shitty Wordpress markup almost without flaw so I just left a lot of the odd little bits in there since the end user doesn't see any of that crap.
Anyways, just wanted to post a little update since I've been quiet for a bit.