I wanna build an Eleventy site.

I’m on a long weekend up in Seattle, and I’ve given myself a project: I am going to make the basic skeleton of an Eleventy website before I get home.

Why?

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I got this site up by choosing an off-the-shelf theme instead of agonizing over making my own. I chose Congo, then later jumped to an upgraded fork, Blowfish, and thought I could be satisfied with a slick, modern, capable theme.

Dear reader, I cannot. When it comes to making my digital home, I am too much of an artisan and hacker at heart. I feel a flutter in my chest every time I see another unique IndieWeb site. This week, it was Brennan’s, but it could just as easily have been Robb’s, or Lizbeth’s, or Ana’s. Each site is a unique expression of what matters to its creator, how they see the world, what they want to share. It’s personal. It’s the part of the Web I want to be part of. Blowfish is more capable than anything I could create right now, but it’s not mine.

Brennan wrote, in the post that introduced me to their site, “The IndieWeb only works if people who believe in it are willing to do the actual work.” Now more than ever, I feel called to do the work toward the things I value. My personal website is only one small facet of that—but it’s a facet nonetheless.

What am I going to make?

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I know from past experience that I can lose an ungodly amount of time to futzing about with CSS. I know only enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be efficient or organized. In order to sidestep that, I’m setting the expectation for myself that I’m not focusing on CSS here.

Instead, I want to build a basic skeleton for my site. I’m planning to build it with Eleventy rather than Hugo, in part because it seems all the cool IndieWeb folks are using it, but also because it seems it will be even easier for me to wrangle than Hugo. I don’t know Go, but I have at least a passing understanding of some JavaScript basics. Since I’m starting from the ground, part of this project is also to understand how Eleventy works, and that will be easier when I don’t have to also wade through a new language to do so.

So: a front page. Layouts for list pages and entries. RSS feeds. Header and footer.

Honestly, I don’t know how quickly I’ll be able to bang this out. fLaMEd has a guide to getting started with 11ty that looks pretty comprehensive, so it’s possible I’ll finish with lots of time to spare. Should that happen, I’m sure I’ll find some extra credit, like making custom list views for certain post types or setting up WebMentions (despite Wouter’s warnings). We’ll see.

I’m also going to write about the process.

aside: wrangling my foibles

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My weaknesses and foibles have always accreted like iron shavings on the magnetized surface that is my personal website. I distinctly remember a 2010 post on my old WordPress blog when I valiantly proclaimed I was “reclaiming my blog”. I was freeing myself of the internal critic, you see! I was giving myself permission to post in my voice, about possibly edgy subjects, and to even post short, less-polished pieces instead of careful essays! This was what was going to help me write more, you see!

It was one of many such attempts. They never lasted.

I have scolded myself and chided myself and said “JUST WRITE!” more times than I can count. I have told myself that this website upgrade, or this declaration of intent, was the key, over and over. The fact remains, wrestling myself into a place where I write and share on my website frequently—despite it being a thing I want to do!—has been an uphill struggle for fifteen-plus years.

I’m in my mid-30’s, and I’m beginning to acknowledge that I have some issues with my attention. I’m not in a place to judge whether they rise to a diagnosable level¹, but they’re undoubtedly present. They swarm around things I care deeply about, pulling in contradictory directions and clouding my vision.

Make it perfectly you, says one. Write, write, write, chants another. Tolerate your imperfections. Don’t publish that, it’s trite. Their droning makes my bones buzz, and I want to escape, I want to bang out a dozen different essays, I want to shout and I want to hide. I want to simultaneously do everything and nothing at all.

It’s 8:35pm. I have an hour and a half until bed. I start a new draft, put a couple sentences in. It’s not right. Nevermind. Another corpse for the pile.

I don’t know if it’s ADHD, but I do know that ADHD and executive functioning issues are not solved by willpower or knowledge, they’re addressed, imperfectly, by systems. And I am trying to build better systems. I don’t yet have the 750 Words diligence, but I try, more days than not, to journal a little bit, to force some ink out of the nib. After I spent all of 2025 letting my home server languish, I organized myself and pushed, and whaddya know, things moved. I try to capture and define my projects so they exist externally to my brain, as more than simply a growing sense of dissatisfaction and inadequacy. I am trying to embrace incrementalism over perfection.

Building this new site is an exercise in these principles. I’m going to define the project and see if, with some diligence and a careful scope, I can actually get something done.

Having said that, I need to stop writing and start making. Let’s see what I can create by day’s end.