The 11ty Update

October 6, 2024

Tags: Site Updates, Web Mastery

Once again, I have updated my website! \o/ As I've mentioned in a previous post, I decided to use 11ty in order to speed up the development process!

Unfortunantly, school started shortly after I decided to do that. I have actually spent very little time on updating the site; most of the time spent between then and now was just me focusing on my school work. And job work - if you didn't know, I work for my university as a writing tutor, so I only work when school is "in session".

So, what's changed?

• colors were adjusted to improve contrast
• background image no longer scrolls with the rest of the site
• the navigation bar is now a side bar
• the side bar dissapears on small screens, replaced instead by a drop-down-menu on the top of the screen
• "skip to nav" and "skip to content" now work
• blog was overhauled! It's no longer in an iframe (yay!), and there were some other visual changes
• actually, there's a lot of small visual tweaks that have been made - too many for me to list (or remember)

Backend stuff?

• files and folders shuffled around to make locating them easier
• CSS is now divided into two files, one for structure and one for style. This is for supr duper secret reasons :3c
• the blog is no longer a nightmare to update!!!! I don't need to change fifteen million files! I can write posts in markdown! It is beautiful!
• the entire site is easier to update now actually
• the site's source code is now on github, which allows me to sync my files between computers. Which is good, because by all accounts this laptop I'm using should NOT be alive right now... not sure if or when it'll ever just stop working.

And what's new?

• more toybox items were added
• a new credit page was added
• there's two new buttons on the side bar

Anything still planned?

• return of the shrines
• I'd like to make my own adoptables for other people to potentially use in their toy boxes
• an art page to display my arts
• I want to tweak my about page a bit, mostly to add some new fursona lore. Did you know Grub is made of goo? And if you squish him he'll just pop back into shape? Probably not, as I still need to add that lore!
• a microblog on the main page. There's credits listed for it in the credits page, but it didn't work when I uploaded the site. I don't feel like fixing it now, so I'll do that later.
• I should also add a link to the github page, but right now I am eepy and want to lay down lol

Working with 11ty has been a blast. I've ran into some frutrating issues, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with some research or asking around. Or just tweaking it myself (shout out to that time that a page wouldn't render because I didn't realize tags were case sensitive).

Connecting to github also intimidated me a fair bit, as I've never done that before. And while Visual Studio Code gave me some issues (such as making the "confrim" check mark not at all obvious >n>) it all ended up being fine.

Huge shout out to this blog post by Mebi for getting me started. I also got a fair bit of trouble-shooting help from the 11ty Second 11ty YouTube series.

And another to the 32bit Cafe community for also helping me troubleshoot whenever coding decided to be mean to me. I think that's all for now. I'm going to go lay down now lol.