Tag Archives: Eleventy

Month notes

February 2025 month notes

Winter viruses knocked me about a bit this month so I wasn’t able to get out to all the tech events I had hoped to get to and there were a few bed bound days which were pretty disappointing.

I also have a bit of a backlog on writing up the things that I did attend this month.

Synchronising

While I pay for a few synchronisation services (SpiderOak and pCloud) their Linux integration is a bit cumbersome so I’ve been looking for simpler ways to share files between my local machines. I read a great tutorial about SyncThing. The project’s documentation on getting started with SyncThing was also pretty great.

It took less than an hour to get everything going and now I have two of my laptops sharing content in a single folder so it’s possible to move things like credential files around between them simply and hopefully securely. It doesn’t seem to be taking up any meaningful system resources so far.

I also want to spend more time with LocalSend which looks an app version of the PWA PairDrop (cute name, based on Snap Drop). All the functionality looks good and it seems to be lightweight. I’m not quite sure why the app makes a difference over the PWA version.

Zettelkasten

This month I had a bunch of headaches with Roam Research failing logins on Linux and AppImage having a bug which meant that Obsidian and Logseq have to be run outside the sandbox. Getting things working properly was frustrating and while Roam is web-based it has no really mobile web version.

So instead I’d like to stop subscribing to Roam and figure out what I’m using it for. The knowledge connecting is still the most valuable thing compared to pure outliners or personal wikis. Both Logseq and Obsidian are good for this and currently my preference is for Logseq but I think Obsidian is better maintained and has a bigger community.

The other thing I was doing was dropping links into the daily journal for later sorting and processing. I’ve created a little web app to make this easier, currently I’m just building a backlog but it will be interesting to see what I find useful when I do want to dig up a link.

I also started using Flatnotes deployed via PikaPods to have an indie web way of taking a note on the phone but editing and refining it on laptops.

It’s interesting that it has taken so many different services to replace Roam, maybe that’s a sign of value but I think that I was overloading it with different functionality and I’m refining things into different workloads now.

Eleventy

Eleventy is a very cool static website builder that I would like to use as my main website generator in the long run. For now though I am still trying to learn the 11ty way (I currently use Jekyll); this month I was trying to figure out how to use data files and tags, things that power a lot of tricks in my current site.

Eleventy is ridiculously powerful because you can define data files to be executing Javascript files that read URLs or the filesystem and generate data that is then passed on to the page generation context. As an example you can read the directory where the data file is located, read the contents, filter out the directories and then generate a derived value from the directory name and use that as a data value in the rendered page.

In the past I’ve tended to use templates and front-matter in Markdown posts but with Eleventy you can use a mix of shared templates, including inheritance, and a Nunjucks page using these powerful data files and not really need to use Markdown or front-matter so much. You can also share snippets between the Nunjucks pages to get consistency where you need it but have a lot more flexibility about the way page renders.

It is amazing how flexible the system is but it also means that as there are multiple ways to do things there can be a lot of reading to do to figure out what the best way to do something is for your context. Documentation of the basics is good but examples of approaches are spread out across example repos and people’s blogs.

Power is great but so is one obvious way of doing things.

Interesting links

It’s not a fun subject but my former colleague Matt Andrew’s post about coping with redundancy was a good read with good advice for any kind of job seeking regardless of the cause.

Ofcom is making a dog’s dinner of applying the Online Safetry Act (OSA) to small communities and it seems to be down to community members to try and engage them in the problems, this writeup gives examples of the problems and pointers on how the regulator can improve.

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Programming

What I learnt publishing an Eleventy site to Github Pages

I have an Eleventy site in a Github repo and I want to publish it, what could be more logical or easier than pushing it to Github Pages?

Well, the process was relatively easy but there was still enough gotchas to make it worth recording the lessons learned. First off the Eleventy documentation for Github Pages is not great, I ended up using the Starter Template for Jekyll combined with the Vite documentation but I think a few of my problems came from mashing up my sources.

First things first, you have to manually set your repo’s project Pages setting to Github Actions for anything to happen. I thought the Github Actions could somehow set this up via the configure Pages action but it is a cart before horse situation.

I had quite a few obscure YAML parsing errors and you don’t get any more detail back than “your file is wrong”. I found the action linter invaluable but I also faced a problem that my syntax problem was being reported on the job name but the actual problem was further down from the reported line. Cutting and pasting segments into the linter eventually allowed me to track down the problematic statement and get a parsed file.

Permissions on a job are not additive to the base permissions but override them. I thought I was adding a permission at the job level but I was in fact resetting them.

Having the permissions wrong resulted in an obscure error message Unable to get ACTIONS_ID_TOKEN_REQUEST_URL env variable which is the authorisation endpoint for an API action. The reason it is unavailable is that the permission isn’t set for the execution context.

Github Pages will publish to <Github username>.github.io/<repo name> which means that by default all the Eleventy generated links will be wrong. You need to use the Base plugin (confusing named to suggest an affinity to the base element) but totally different.

Concurrency was interesting and people seem to do a lot of different things. My conclusion is that the deployment job should only have one instance but shouldn’t be cancelled. If you have a build job that can be split by branch and should be cancelled if a new job is triggered.

Having different concurrency rules seems to be a big reason for splitting up the build and deployment activities, otherwise just having one end to end job seems easier to work with.

I should probably have gone with a starter template (you get offered them when you switch on Github Actions for a repository), unless you’re using a specific tool the static template seems the best. From here you just need to replace the artifact upload action with a build and upload step.

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