beefyi

Why no more 11ty footer?

announcementstoolswriting

Did you stop using Eleventy?

No.

I am still using 11ty, and as of writing this, I am still using Eleventy v3.1.2 and the site is being built by it. This is not a dramatic breakup post. There was no betrayal, no late night migration to some artisanal static site generator written by a sleep deprived wizard in a cave.

So if you noticed that the little "Built with Eleventy" line disappeared from the footer, the answer is not "because I abandoned 11ty".

It is because I thought it looked cleaner without it.

So where did the Eleventy note go?

I moved it into the About page.

That felt like the most reasonable place for it. The About page is already the section where I explain what this site is, why it exists, and what I am doing with it. Mentioning the tooling there makes more sense than attaching the same badge-like sentence to every single page forever.

Why even mention this at all?

Because if I quietly remove a small visible detail from a website, there is a non-zero chance that future me will look at it in six months and wonder whether I did that on purpose or whether I accidentally deleted it.

Also, I think tiny design decisions are interesting. Not because every one of them is profound, but because personal sites are made out of lots of little choices that are too small to justify a manifesto and too deliberate to be entirely random.