Migrated to Static Site (Eleventy)

After a nice 11 year run on WordPress I have spent the last few weeks migrating this site to the Eleventy (11ty) static site generator and switched over on the 24th. WordPress was fun to learn and had some nice features, but in the end was overkill for what I needed and I tired of keeping up with version upgrades and recovering from spammers hacking my site. I have some more detailed notes to write up later, but some quick thoughts...

Why move off WordPress?

• Hosting it myself meant keep up with WordPress and plugin upgrades to keep current
• I made progress on but never quite finished my WordPress Powered by GitHub and Docker idea
• Tired of being hacked, whether it was simple spam link injections or full site takeovers
• Dependent on plugins such as SEO which were constantly pushing to become a paid/premium member

Why move to Eleventy static site generator?

• Simplify
  • No database involved; everything in Markdown files
  • Entire site stored in GitHub
  • Minimal JavaScript running on the client side (majority is during the build)
• Chose Eleventy because it's quite popular (finding help, ideas, themes, etc)
• Learn something new, especially the full npm/JavaScript build environment