A blog about web tech

Here's some advice about how to let Bundler know where to find your gem while you are developing on Read more

It is time to start a new site and the question is should I use Jekyll, as all my other current sites use (those that aren't still hand-coded HTML) or try something new. I've been wanting to try something new for a while but common sense (?) says that I should just use what I've been using, because why keep reinventing the wheel? I'm not saying that I'm some sort of big industry or innovator, but I did write some plug-ins and generators for Jekyll and I liked being able to add/modify the functionality and wanted to continue to do so.

So, I had noticed that Stephanie Eckles, respected CSS figure had mentioned 11ty (or Eleventy) as one of the things she does. And once I started looking around, chatter about 11ty was everywhere.

Having just once again suffered through the dimly remembered pain of learning about Jekyll, Liquid, and hash (associative) arrays, I am recording it here to save myself the next time I go for a few years between dealing with it. Official documentation does not say this (enough?), I guess because they think, "They can't, so let's not bother talking about it." This leaves the experienced programmer new to Liquid going "I should be able to do this, why can't I just assign myHash = { one: 1, two: 2 } or ["one" => "1", "two" => "2"] or some combination of braces and quotes or other punctuation? Do I just have the syntax wrong???"