Thursday, October 12, 2023

Introduced blog. Confused about Eleventy frontmatter for dates.

Today I created the very beginnings of this blog, which is generated with the static site generator 11ty. I started from scratch with the help of 11ty.Recipes. I am creating it in preparation for my upcoming batch at the Recurse Center, so that it will be easy to keep a record of my time there from the very start.

Date Woes

I got very muddled down with trying to manage the dates of these log entries in a pleasant way. I learned some about date filters and computed data, but got too confused to really even understand if what I want is possible.

Currently, my front matter looks like this:

date: 2023-10-12 14:00:00-7
day: "2023-10-12"
eleventyComputed:
  title: "2023-10-12"

• I have to manually enter a time and timezone so that 11ty won't think I'm talking about UTC instead of my home timezone.
• I created a custom data key day where I manually re-enter the date as a string. This is used for generating permalinks and the page title.
• I don't write the date in title directly because I might want to change how the titles are generated in the future, but don't want the permalinks to change.
• 11ty has a great variety of options for generating the date of a page, but I want a date option that is both stable under modification and can be retroactive (in case I forget to write a log for a day in time, but want to write it retrospectively).

This should be possible, right?

Task Ideas

This section is for tasks I want on my radar, but haven't committed to yet.

• Create a projects section
• Create an about
• Describe my web development approach for this blog
• Link to my craft/math site
• Publish this blog
• Write about my goals at RC
• Write a page for the event I want to facilitate