Eleventy - initial impressions, and Turbolinks
Some Eleventy highlights + Turbolinks
May 18 2020
I’m really glad I settled on using Eleventy for this site. After the initial “finding my way around”, I feel like I’ve got the hang of how Eleventy works. PS: If you don’t know what eleventy is, I write about it in my first blog post
What I like about Eleventy so far:
-
The ability to mix different input formats for my web pages. So far I’m using Nunjucks templates for web pages that need some logic handling, and markdown files for my blog.
-
They way you create pages and content from data. I love that I can simply write a function that returns whatever data I need, which is then fetched on build-time and ready for use in my templates. Check out this example of how to create pages from data. So far I’m getting data for my bookshelf page and my top Spotify artists page. Feels good not having to fetch that data in the client.
Turbolinks
I've also added Turbolinks to my site. Turbolinks works this way: Whenever you click a link on my site, instead of doing a full page reload Turbolinks hijacks the click event. It then fetches the page and basically swaps out everything inside the
tag. Getting Turbolinks up and running couldn't be easier. You just drop the script tag in your and it works. 🥳 It's a nice and easy way to get the instant page load you get with a SPA.I’m looking forward to juice up this site some more going forward. While I love a minimalistic approach to most web sites, I also want to sprinkle some fancyness here and there.