Today marks the day for the 11ty International Symposium on Making Websites Real Good.

I’m going to try and live blog the event here rather than on social media or post a bunch of small notes on my site through to Mastodon and Bluesky.

I’ll start by saying I think the philosophy behind 11ty is exactly how people want to build for the web. It’s simplicity is sublime but you can supercharge and really do what ever you want with it. For front end, there aren’t really any rules? Pick from a handful of templating languages, use what ever CSS you’re heart desires. Data? Where ever you want it.

Aren’t you tired of spending all of your time on caching web pages and dealing with servers? Get it out of the way up front and focus on the content and the design. Lower the technical debt.

The chat is great and if you understand who and what Mat Marquis has done for responsive images on the web, this says it all:

eleventy made it so I personally do not have to think about responsive images anymore
Mat Marquis

“No Moat by Design”

Top quote from chat about the question of when 3.0 will be released: “sustainable development, not arbitrary deadlines” (Eric Bailey)

Every person who does any web development or design should be required to watch this Miriam Suzanne talk. "“Let the browser work out the details. If we can avoid touching it, we should.”

Paul Everitt - “Never went to the browser and never went to the console.log” is a pretty good selling point.

(I’m not linking to the speakers for speed but their profiles and links are on the conference site)

During the break there’s a beautiful video highlighting all of the people who are using 11ty. The diversity of design is inspiring.

chrome user experience

I could write a whole post about Dan Sinker but suffice to say it was the exact kind of inspiration I needed.

My small connection to him was when he was doing imeachment.fyi He wanted a relative “how many weeks” its been on the site. But the caveat was it had to be Liquid. He didn’t care about your javascript solution. He wasn’t interested in a different platform. Man after my own heart. So I took a look. He was using GitHub Pages with a custom YAML file that he wrote each day’s notes in. It worked for him. He wasn’t going to change that and if it couldn’t be done in Liquid, fuck it. Really after my heart. I took a stab and cobbled together some Liquid using his data model and found a solution. Sort of. I didn’t account for the impeachment to run into the next year. I hacked a one year fix in but I’m sure if you visit it now it’s broken. But that’s not the point. He made the point again today in his talk. Make things. Don’t be afraid of a few rough edges. I’ll add rough edges wear down with use.

Work with the grain of the web. - Chris Ferdinandi

Watching people grok HTML web components in real time in the chat is nice.

I need to revisit the code in the components I’ve made.

make weird things on the internet - ivan zhao

I appreciate that the last speaker, Sara Joy, is speaking to something most sites have either dealt (sort of) with or will need to deal with from an accessibility first stand point. Dark mode is something that I appreciate beyond aesthetics, particularly as my vision has declined as I’ve aged.