eleventy-base-blog VS Tailwind CSS

11ty is a lightweight static site generator. I chopped up my HTML and used the 11ty starter template called eleventy-base-blog as the structural foundation for the site.

Sure! It's on github at https://github.com/nosecreek/dustin-lammiman - I started with https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog for the basic templating logic.

Eleventy Base Blog demo site Source

To generate a static blog, we will be using Eleventy. Using the blog example from Eleventy as a base for our blog. Clone the repository:

I would do this with Eleventy which is a powerful static site generator with support for html partials (partial is what I call your toolbar here). You would use the template language nunjucks which Eleventy comes with support for, or you can choose plain html too if you don't want the Nunjucks capabilities for logic like if/else, for loops, javascript injection of dynamic values in your html at site generation time, etc. This repo shows most of the techniques you could need and use: https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog

For the second site I made using 11ty, I used this repo which is a more advanced 11ty template that can be customized. After following the instructions in the README.md file and edited all the markdown I came up with this:

Pre-established Eleventy Blog Template Go to eleventy base blog to clone the repository to your local file/folder.

The next example we'll look at goes more into depth of 11ty. We are creating this site from this template.

Say you want a more professonal looking site without having to do a lot of extra work, you’re in luck! 11ty has a community that has created templates that are available at this site. For this example, we will use the eleventy-base-blog, make sure to go to this repo and select the USE THIS TEMPLATE button to make a copy of the project in your namespace.

Finally, for our front end, we’re going to be pairing Next.js with the great combination of TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui so we can focus on building the functionality of the app and let them handle making it look awesome!

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.

This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository

Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

- Performance is a feature.

Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).