Late Night Tinkering

Last night, in a heated web design rage, I redesigned the tiny website of my newsletter, How Not To Make A Book. It bugged me for a while that I didn’t have archives of all the posts that are sent out via Buttondown and now it feels pretty good to read these missives in this format.

I want to keep each website as simple as possible so adding a CMS or something is always a nightmare that I want to avoid. I opted for Eleventy here instead and my god I always forget how great it is. There’s a few tricky things, like not knowing what comes out of the box versus what functions you need to write yourself, but once that mental model of Eleventy fits together in your head then you can snap websites together like a big puzzle. It’s fantastic.

Although, the project isn’t anywhere near perfect yet and so here’s what I need to do next:

• Add an RSS feed
• Polish the visual design
• Fix the line-height/font-sizes

But hey! It’s slowly coming together and I’ve always believed that websites are different from other kinds of software where you can iterate and iterate slowly over time. So long as you’re heading in the right direction, all the bumps in the road will smooth themselves out.

Anyway, Eleventy is great and websites are cool as hell.