Back in the day, before I was a father, I briefly worked as a consultant for a web design firm in Baltimore. It's something I've always been interested in, but when the kids came and the hours at the office became longer and longer, I had to change gears. I moved towards more of a sys admin and support engineer role. Being on the fediverse with all you smart, wonderful, and creative people has inspired me to dive back in and brush up on modern web design. I don't plan to make a career change out of it, but it can't hurt to have an extra skill, and maybe a side gig or fallback option.

I have heard a lot about Eleventy via Mastodon, especially in the last couple of weeks. So today, I decided to look into it and try to give it a spin. I've used Netlify in the past for other projects, like running Elk, so that seemed like the best way forward, at least for now. I forked an Eleventy blog boilerplate repo from ixartz and deployed it to Netlify.

Thanks to a suggestion from Kev Quirk on Mastodon, I'm editing the site with Front Matter CMS, which is an extension for VSCode (my preferred editor). It's pretty awesome. For now I'm learning the site structure and soon I hope to learn how to customize the CSS and add a bit of flair and personality to this thing. If you have any tips or tools to offer, hit me up on Mastodon or XMPP.