I made a new tiny website to keep track of what I’m reading and to annotate what I found to be interesting in those books. The domain is inherited from a tumblr I no longer update (because I do not enjoy tumblr the platform anymore).
I built it with 11ty, currently my favourite static site generator. It feels really lightweight, and vanilla; it’s refreshing to find a lightweight way to build simple sites in a land crowded with frameworks. I tried Gatsby.js a while ago and — just my personal opinion here — it really felt like I was fighting against the web when all I needed was putting together a few html documents.
There’s a simple way to generate pages from external data in 11ty, so initially I had it set up to retrieve the books from Goodreads. Given where Goodreads seems to be going, though, I switched to just using markdown files.
(Aside: I’m trying Netlify for hosting and Fathom for analytics — so far they’re great.)
