Woman with glasses and stars antenna reading a book

July.19 - Site updates, considering 11ty, grumpy about lack of Indie Web accessability.

Graffiti of a fish that says 'suspish' under it.

Site updates

Thinking about friction with this site, possibly using 11ty or something similar?

I keep considering this and then immediately talking myself out of it. I love this project. But there are two points of friction that are keeping me from writing as often as I'd like:

- Updating the RSS feed and the index pages. It takes several steps to do the RSS page, and it's easy to make small errors that then break the feed. So I have to really be in the right place to want to tackle that - no brain fog, not distracted, able to focus on that. How often does that happen? Well, judging by how often I've written in June and July, about 2-4 times a month. I don't like this, I'd like to write a lot more often than this. I think if I were still using Pika, I would be. I also have to update the 2025 index of blog posts, and that would be really nice to automate, too.

- Formatting text. Writing "freehand" in Nova, like I am now, is generally fine. A little annoying to have to add all the HTML tags sometimes, but okay. The friction increases with wanting to copy and paste. For instance, I don't have a way to archive my Mastodon posts, and I'd like to keep those. Right now the closest I get is the website Just My Toots, but I don't own that site and have no way to archive that page for my own use. I don't mind copying and pasting posts, this takes seconds to do, I can just dump them into Nova. I don't need a fancy automation tool. But then I have to format them, and I never seem to get around to that.

What are the downsides to using an SSG like 11ty?

Oh gosh. Let me count the ways.

Possibly really great upsides

Okay so just now...

I went to check out 11ty. It says I need something called Node. No idea what that is. Some program? Does something for 11ty. It says you can download Node here. I visit the page and see that I have options

I ask Greg what these options are. He asks what I'm downloading, and I say, "Node, it's got something to do with 11ty?"

"Do you have to?"

He said he tries to avoid "this stuff" as much as he can, and he'd have to look it up.

Okay, so right away, this is a great example of what goes through my head when IndieWeb folks say, "Everyone should make a blog!" What are your options? If you're Gen X, you might remember how to put together a basic HTML page, which is exactly what I'm doing with this site. Maybe you can put together a dozen of these and link them together. But over the course of a year, can you do that with a hundred or so blog posts? What if you want one of those sites that has a little fun page for a few dozen different projects? With lots of photos? How do you keep track of all that?

For that, you need some kind of automation. And there's the rub. A program that does this doesn't exist anymore. We had it with Dreamweaver in the 90's and early 2000's, but now you have to be able to use a static site generator and know programming languages like JavaScript. Can your neighbor tell you what Node is or whether they should download it fnm or nvm or Docker? Because I have no clue.

I thought maybe I'd ask Chat GPT whether there was an easy way to know how to download this Node app, and it referenced a lot of programming...languages? I think? ...that I didn't recognize, and it left me with this chart:

Even Chat GPT assumes I'm a developer if I'm asking this question! This is the real inaccessibility of this stuff, and why I get so frustrated when tech folks pat each other on the back for making these little fun sites and then say, "See! Anyone can do it! The internet is for everyone!"

It isn't though. It's for people who know what fnm or nvm or Docker means. That isn't everyone, however much you want to pretend it is. Which sucks. And I wish more people cared about that, especially in an age where it'd sure be nice if the internet were a more accessible place for individuals rather than companies.

The next step...

Besides being really grumpy about how actually inaccessible the much ballyhooed IndieWeb life is? Well, I'm not giving up. I'm blessed with supportive friends who do know how to code, although it's not escaping my notice that one person who tried to help me get 11ty off the ground a couple years ago is now urging me not to try it again. Another friend is right now trying to write me a script that might fix the RSS problem. Even if that doesn't get finished, I'm so touched they're trying. <3

As for 11ty, I'm going to just download whatever the default Node thing is, and see if I can figure out how to get this working? A lot of tutorials exist, I'll see if I can find one that works for where I'm at.

I don't do a comments section, but if you want to respond to this, you're welcome to send me an email at hi at eilloh dot net.