I decided it was time that my website had a blog. I wanted to keep it simple and static so that it would fast to load. So I began to research some of the more popular static site generators. I was looking for something written in javascript, because I wanted to manage all frontend and tooling dependencies through one package manager. It eventually came down to either using Gatsby or Eleventy. I could have picked the Vue (Gidsome) or Svelte (Sapper) equivalents of Gatsby but the huge Gatsby community of plugins and starters had me sold.
Too Much javascript#
Just as I was about to re-(re?)build this site with Gatsby I read a great blog post that mentioned how a React/Gatsby sites pushes 138kb of javascript to the client 🤔. That is hard for me to justify. So I went in the opposite direction and gave myself the challenge of creating this blog with no frontend javascript at all.
No javascript#
Other than one small snippet of javascript to preload pages to make this site even faster, You'll find no other javascript here. No big frameworks or libraries, just pure html and css.
To build this site I started off with the 11ty xity starter because it had a well organized file structure. From that I removed all the frontend JS, and added tailwindcss.
If you are interested in the source code you can find it here.