Gatsby VS eleventy 🕚⚡️

I initially built the site using a static site technology called Gatsby, not realizing that it was actually a dead project. After a little research, I found that Next.js is a pretty popular alternative for building a static site, so I set myself to the task of porting it.

After Netlify’s acquisition of Gatsby, the framework’s development trajectory shifted. With a focus on integrating with Netlify’s ecosystem, Gatsby’s innovation appears to be gone. Throughout the entire 2024 we’ve seen only 1 minor update in the 5.x branch and even that consists mainly of bumped dependencies and small fixes:

Marking the first days and months of 2024 I started a site to host articles and blogs and what I called uploadz and missivz. I am using Astro having migrated from Gatsby in years previous. Astro is arguably faster to compile static sites and has a simpler, cleaner, in my view, way of creating simple component based web pages. It has the capability of embedding 'islands' of react, svelte, even plain Javascript and far more without having to go full on SPA if you don't want to. This was too tempting not to take a look and quite frankly I got hooked. Whilst I don't use a fraction of what Astro has to offer it has become a go-to for me for not just static sites but also to create POCs, quick Demos and more. It also has become the basis of a lightweight content management system I am developing and have implemented this year for clients and a non-profit. The CMS I refer to uses a back-end written in Laravel.

Gatsby: Primarily a static site generator, but also supports SSR.

It is a collection of beautifully designed user interface (UI) components that you can easily copy and paste into your applications. Developers can use it with any framework that supports React, like Next, Gatsby, Remix, and others.

Gatsby Official Documentation

My previous website used the Gatsby framework, for a simple reason: I am very familiar with React, so I thought customization would be easier. However, I later realized I didnt have time to maintain a bunch of Typescript and Javascript, which made me reluctant to update my website. This time, I choose Hugo. Maintaining a small amount of Go Template is easier, and I am familiar with Golang, too.

Gatsby: A static site generator ideal for content-heavy websites, offering performance optimizations out of the box. Gatsby Documentation

**Gatsby** is optimized for building fast static websites and apps with a focus on performance and SEO. It uses GraphQL for data management.

Static sites are a thing of beauty and simplicity. They're fast, secure, and easy to manage. The JAMStack movement help made it popular (after SPAs) and static site builders like Hugo and Eleventy are making it simple to build websites in this manner. I dare not mention Astro because it's the new kid making building static sites cooler than ever.

There were many ways for doing this (thanks to redditors!). One of the best was generating static website and utilizing a CMS that allows github syncing. I went for 11ty (Eleventy) + Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS) + Netlify Identity and I was able build something like this within couple of days:

I recently migrated my personal website from Next.js to 11ty, it was a great experience, which I will write more about in a later blog post.

If you're looking to start a blog (or if you're thinking of redesigning yours although you haven't posted in 2 years), you'll stumble upon a lot of options and it can be incredibly daunting; and if you stumble with the newest Josh's post about his stack it is easy to feel overwhelmed with the shown stack.

I also proposed using Bootstrap with https://www.11ty.dev for the templates. It's much easier to update a JSON file than to work with WordPress.

By using relative paths for assets and loading Bootstrap from a CDN, I can zip the website and share it via email.

I made a new branch of my website and followed the instructions in the v3.0.0-beta.1 release notes:

I write and create my posts using markdown, this is then converted to html with 11ty engine. The layout of the page are decided by the metadata in the front matter section, 11ty the uses the layouts I have created using Nunjucks. This way I can add metadata and control how the page is rendered, I can inject sections and links.

Eleventy. It’s a static site generator that’s super stable, they take backwards compatibility ver seriously so you can count on it for a long time. It’s lightweight so you don’t have to install a million dependencies to get it working, and it’s the only one of the big SSG projects that’s independently funded so they’re not chasing VC backed hyper growth.

https://www.11ty.dev/