I haven't had an active personal site in forever. The goal this time is to just have something simple, minimally aesthetic, and easily maintainable up.

I didn't want to spend time creating something from scratch or messing much with design, since it's really easy to go down a rabbit hole of perfecting personal sites, and that's not what I care to do right now. Feature-wise, I just wanted an easy blogging setup (ideally Markdown based), syntax highlighting for code blocks, and basic SEO support.

I've tried Wordpress, Jekyll, and Hugo briefly in the past. Wordpress is overkill, I didn't want to deal with bundler errors with Jekyll, and Hugo was fine, but I wondered if there were more modern tools these days.

After timeboxing comparisons of static site generators^[1], I saw Eleventy mentioned enough that it seemed worth checking out, along with Pelican and Astro. Eleventy looked suitably lightweight, and truthfully it came down to the fact that I found a pre-built theme that met the minimal aesthetic I was looking for and was easy to set up and tweak^[2].

My domain is registered with Namecheap and the site is deployed via Vercel, both of which have served me just fine^[3].

I'm sure I'll uncover issues along the way with Eleventy, and maybe someday I'll want to design something from scratch, but for now, this feels right and "good enough".