Fresh paint, fresh start

Last year, in what must have been a pique of new year energy, I started working on both redesigning this blog and investigating what it might take to migrate it from Middleman to Eleventy.

While all my previous experience with static site generators had been with ones that were Ruby based (specifically Middleman and Jekyll), I learned of Eleventy when I was looking for a static site generator I could reliably teach to users regardless of their operating system. I taught my first semester using Eleventy in fall 2018 and wanted to continue to expand my knowledge and troubleshooting, so it felt like moving my blog to using Eleventy would accomplish that. 🎉

Like so many others, 2020 made a wreck of my best-laid plans (I even had a GitHub project board!). The git history for this repo lets me know I started work on the code January 4, 2020, after forking the Eleventy base blog template…and promptly stopped on February 3.

I got sidetracked by a freelance project, teaching a workshop and then, yep, a pandemic. Evidently, this is also pretty par for the course for this blog, too. I just went back and read my original post and discovered that I started writing that post in 2013…only to publish it in 2015:

I immediately bookmarked it and started writing this initial post…and then I landed a few big freelance projects, got involved with Girl Develop It, got a job, bought a house, sent a kid off to college…essentially, life happened.

–Adorable Past Me

This blog is essentially just for me, so I’m not raking myself over the coals here–mostly just amused at how consistent I am about having ✨very good intentions✨ about blogging.

As I wrote in 2013/15, I’ve benefitted greatly from the blogs of others, and I also believe in the joy of personal web sites, of having my acre of Internet pixels that I build and curate.

So this is a reboot: My blog has been rebuilt using Eleventy, redesigned par moi and I’m sharing my words, thoughts and experiences again.