Yesterday’s check-in came in pretty long and meandering (me? never!), so I’m gonna try to keep today’s brief. Briefer.
Yesterday’s task was working through the Learn Eleventy tutorial. I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I was feeling unclear about how all the pieces worked together under the hood; while this tutorial didn’t clear it up entirely, it definitely helped. It gave me a lot of practice manipulating data within Eleventy.
I did everything in the “Introduction and Basics” module once, following the instructions to the letter, I then started again, intending to adapt what I was learning to my site project.
As I was doing that, I also found myself referencing, and often outright copying, Brennan’s source for their blog. I’m trying to be somewhat honest here and leave out stuff that either isn’t relevant now, isn’t part of my vision for the site, or I don’t understand, but I can’t deny that I’ve been reading a lot of the source over there and copying it over.
You’ll notice the tone of remorse there. I’m realizing that I haven’t allowed myself to be fully comfortable with the hacker mindset of building through copying and tinkering. Brennan’s blog source is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0, a copyleft license; it is designed to facilitate distribution and modification1. Brennan even writes:
As an additional permission under GNU AGPL version 3, section 7: You are granted permission to use the templates, layouts, and design patterns of this site as the basis for your own independent website…
So even if I were copying things over wholesale, that is explicitly permitted. And I’m not, I’m doing what amateur web designers and hackers have always done, which is to learn by reading and remixing.
But some part of my mind is nevertheless convinced I’m doing it wrong, that the only responsible way to build a personal website is to excrete every character of code from my own noggin. If I’m copying pieces, then my output is going to somehow be second-rate. All the cool IndieWeb kids will know I’m a poser! 😱
…
Sometimes, you just need to say it out loud to give the brain time to catch up and shake itself out of it.
Continuing with Learn Eleventy is today’s plan.
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Provided I also use the AGPL, of course—I haven’t overlooked that part. ↩︎