Eleventy Powers this Site

Happy 2.0 Eleventy, the technology behind Brian.ly.

Eleventy is the technological force behind Brian.ly. It released version 2.0 this week and I couldn’t be happier with things.

What is Eleventy?

Eleventy is a static site generator. The entire site is built and uploaded each time I decide to add something new, rather than having programming languages behind the scenes interact directly with a database to store, retrieve, and display information at the time someone interacts with the site.

A static site generator is suited for a blog/portfolio site as information isn’t constantly changed or updated by many users.

A social media, chat, shopping, or other site with increased and frequent user interaction usually isn’t a good candidate for static site generator technology.

Why did I choose Eleventy for this site?

I use Jekyll on other projects but find it limited in flexibility and power; I also considered Gatsby, but quickly ran into it being more than I needed.

Eleventy bubbled to the top as the best middle ground. It is focused on getting things running quickly, but with the flexibility and power to add options, configure items and extend it in whatever ways might be most useful for your project. In practice, I’ve found it to be exactly that - a wondeful middle ground static site generator.