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MarcL committed Sep 13, 2020
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I bought the domain names (.com and .co.uk) for my name way back in 2007 but never built a website for them until a year later. I'd had my [DJ Cruze](djcruze.co.uk) website since 2004 and that ran on [Blogger](https://www.blogger.com) and then on [Wordpress](https://wordpress.com/) when I got a bit more tech savvy. I moved my personal site onto using Wordpress and then left it to rot with about 4 or 5 blog posts and not much love.
## How this site started

In 2015 I realised that Wordpress was unnecessary for such a minimal website with little dynamic content. Instead I started investigating [static site generators](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/). I chose [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) as it seemed to be the best option at the time and was the framework used for [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/). It took around a month to set up and publish the site. Whilst Jekyll did the job for 5 years, I had little experience in the Ruby ecosystem. Moving the blog from my own hosting to [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) meant locking Ruby Gem versions and trying to add functionality became trickier without diving into Ruby.
I bought the Marc Littlemore domain names (.com and .co.uk) way back in 2007 but never built a website for them until a year later. I'd had my [DJ Cruze](djcruze.co.uk) website since 2004 and that ran on [Blogger](https://www.blogger.com) and then on [Wordpress](https://wordpress.com/) when I got a bit more tech savvy. I moved my personal site onto using Wordpress and then left it to rot with about 4 or 5 blog posts and not much love.

## Why choose Eleventy
In 2015 I wanted to start writing again and Wordpress seemed unnecessary for such a minimal website with little dynamic content. I started reading about [static site generators](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/) and this seemed like a good idea for my site. I chose [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) as it seemed to be the best option at the time and was the framework used for [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/). Whilst Jekyll did the job for 5 years, I had little experience in the Ruby ecosystem and adding functionality became trickier without diving into Ruby.

I'd played around with Gatsby for my wife's author site [clarelittlemore.com](https://clarelittlemore.com) and whilst it gave great results, I found that needing to use GraphQL to query data sources and React to build out the site was too much of an overhead. Since 2015 I'd worked in the JavaScript and Node world so I wanted to find a framework that used Node as the build tool. I'd heard great things about a new framework called [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.dev/) so it was time to see if this was what I needed.
## Why choose Eleventy?

In 2019 I used Gatsby to build my wife's author site [clarelittlemore.com](https://clarelittlemore.com) and whilst it gave great results, I found that needing to use GraphQL to query data sources and React to build out the site was too much of an overhead. Since 2015 I'd worked in the JavaScript and Node world so I wanted to find a framework that used Node as the build tool. I'd played around with [Metalsmith](https://metalsmith.io/) a few years ago but it was now 2020 and I'd heard great things about a new framework called [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.dev/).

## How I moved from Jekyll to Eleventy

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