Slim VS eleventy 🕚⚡️

I spent a few days of my spare time building a VS Code extension that would bring better syntax highlighting for the Slim template language to the editor. I quite enjoyed most of the process so I’d like to share what I learned.

I think they mean Server Side Rendering (normal rails controllers/views), and Slim is just the name of the templating engine. It's a little nicer than the default ERB. https://github.com/slim-template/slim

There's also SSR with react and other js frameworks, but I don't think that's what they meant.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Checkout slim https://github.com/slim-template/slim it's a templating language

And this is what the HTML looks like (I'm using slim):

The template renders the tag and inside it the link and the counter itself (the Slim template language and Tailwind styling are used here, hopefully the notation is sufficiently self-explaining):

In this part of the series, let's explore another popular templating language, Slim.

Templating languages are widely used in Web development and two of the most popular ones are Pug and Slim. In this series, we're going to learn the basics of these two and hopefully they would help improve your workflow further.

You may want to checkout slim I'v tried ERB, SLIM, and HAML and absolutely sware by slim it's very easy to use and saves a ton of typing compared to ERB.

This post outlines the steps for migrating an existing BlogCFC blog to a JamStack, with a focus on using Eleventy.

I suggest you to try out eleventhy (https://www.11ty.dev/)

Quite simple to start, and a nice system to add some scripting and styles without the requirement of bringing in a framework.

A production flag enables you to run activities in dev or production such as minifying assets, showing draft posts, etc. There isn't a built-in flag or function that comes with eleventy (11ty) specifically for this. However we have this info at our fingertips.

I can't recommend Eleventy enough!

https://www.11ty.dev

I converted my WordPress blog to Eleventy 4 years ago and never looked back, it's been delightful!

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

It’s 2024, and you are about to start a new project. Do you reach for React, a framework you know and love or do you look at one of the other hot new frameworks like Astro, Enhance, 11ty, SvelteKit or gasp, plain vanilla Web Components?

The "dev" script is running the eleventy server in dev mode. The details of the script are not important for this discussion, but to round out the background here is an abbreviated version of my package.json:

Eleventy is a fast and powerful SSG that really shines when it comes to pure static site generation because it does not require the loading of a client-side JavaScript bundle in order to serve content.

The irony is using a JavaScript-based static site generator to make the site: https://www.11ty.dev

https://doublejosh.com/post/186193119278/metalsmithjs-is-sti...

Then two years ago I needed a more robust SSR system based on React, so I went with GatsbyJS. It's insanely mature and intuitive, but as we all know that community and business is now drying up too. But the framework is still great.

Now everyone sings the praises of NextJS, which can be used for SSR but is intended for applications and active server endpoints. But more complexity doesn't mean better.

I'm keen to try other simple frameworks when the result is a static site. I may give https://www.11ty.dev a shot.

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.