Added New Pages to Website
A large motivation when I switched my website to eleventy at the beginning of the year was to make modifying and tweaking much easier. So far, I can gladly say that’s been the case. This past month, I finally got around to adding a bunch of pages I’ve had on my todo list for quite some time. With 11ty, the process was super smooth. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve added.
Explore Page
First up was figuring out how to manage navigation with this influx of pages on the website. I solved it by implementing a page I had created months ago, but never enabled: a site index page. This is simply a page where I can link to everything else on my website. While I could get fancy with drop-down navigation menus and other methods (and might one day), why over-complicate things just yet?
The hardest problem I had was deciding what I wanted to name the page. At first it was simply named more… but I didn’t love it. Then while browsing robb knight’s website, I noticed his site referred to this as the Explore page. I liked it, and took the idea for my own website.
Mumbles
Another feature (inspired by Robb’s website, among others) that I’ve long wanted to implement is making a page where I can write short-form snippets that are then forwarded as posts to my mastodon account. Setting it up in 11ty wasn’t too difficult: I just have an index page that takes all the dated entries and displays them in order. I also scripted the process of writing a new entry so I didn’t have to fuss with timestamps and other hindrances.
Once again… naming was my biggest hurdle. Pages like this are often referred to as notes on the indy-web. However… I didn’t want to use that name. To me, notes sound more like a page for a living document. For example, I could have a note page about a project, or programming language. While I don’t define ‘notes’ for anything on my website currently, I wanted to keep the option open.
Same as before, my solution surfaced while browsing the indy-web. I was reading a post on thatalexguy.dev and realized he referred to these short online quips as ‘mumbles’. Again, I loved it and used it myself.
/POSSE
Once I had my ‘mumbles’ working, I set up a feed and linked it with echofeed to forward the mumbles as my Mastodon posts. Now that I was starting up a proper POSSE, I added a /posse slash-page for my strategy to be published if/as it expands.
Script-Generated Pages
My new_mumble.clj wasn’t the only script I wrote during this process. For the next pair of pages, I wrote a Clojure script that generates the page from .org files I already maintain in my Emacs setup. If I update either of those files, I simply run the script with babashka and the markdown is generated for me to push to the site.
Reading List
First up is a reading list/log. While writing my /now updates over the last few months, I usually included a small log at the bottom that listed what books I was currently reading, and recently finished. While writing it, I would often check my reading log note for the information and realized one day… this was stupid. If I have the log, why not just automate that into an update. So I did.
Instead of needing to include my reading progress in /now updates, I just run a script to have the relevant sections from my reading list post to /reading. Easy.
Blogroll
I’ve wanted to add a blogroll to my website for quite some time now, but didn’t want to deal with the hassle. However, now that I’ve been using elfeed for rss, I realized that after writing the reading list script, I could easily do something similar to generate a blogroll.
Using the same approach, I have a Clojure script that reads in my elfeed.org file, and parses the contents into the markdown page 11ty uses to generate /blogroll. It’s not curated and also contains some Reddit/YouTube feeds I’m experimenting with in elfeed, but it is my blogroll.
Various Other Slash Pages
The last few pages I added are various other slash pages that I’ve wanted to add to my site for one reason or another.
/defaults
As a Hemispheric Views Podcast listener, I feel obligated to have a /defaults page. I still don’t understand the scoring (who does?), and might consider tweaking the categories over time to better fit what software I need and use. But for now, I don’t mention any software selections on my /uses page, so this is a good home for that.
/guy
Another slash-page from Hemispheric Views. I really enjoy this page as a sort of quick and to the point /about supplement. It can be very similar to /interests/, but I enjoy this format.
/save
Many services I use have referral programs. Not only do I never take advantage of them when telling others about a service… I often forget which services even have them. At the very least I hope maintaining /save will be a good reference for me 😂.
/chipotle
Last, but not least, we have probably the most important slash-page that exists: /chipotle. While I’m mostly joking, being a burrito lover that has a go-to Chipotle order, it’s not as much of a joke as you may think…
Conclusion
So that’s the rundown of all the pages I’ve added in the past few weeks. I’ve also added a new favicon image instead of just my initials (image included at top of the post). I’m happy with the results, and hope to continue updating and tweaking the pages over time. It’s the little things like this that make having a presence on the indy web so much fun. Enjoy!