Cory Dransfeldt

I went out on a limb recently and decided to build a custom collection in Eleventy that aggregates my post tags and link tags (sourced from Matter). These tags then get appended to shared post or link titles when they're syndicated from my site.

I made a minor update to how I'm normalizing TV data for display on my now page.

My now page consists of a number of similar sections — some bespoke text, a number of media grids and lists. The text is repeated once, the lists are easily templated out in Liquid.js and the media grids are all quite similar. Given the prominence of the media grids on the page and the number of them I decided to consolidate them into a single template while also normalizing the data passed into them as best I could.

My site is built using 11ty and is rebuilt once an hour. These frequent rebuilds accomplish a few things, notably updating webmention data and keeping my now page current. Recently, however, I decided to add the track I'm other currently listening to on my home page which, ideally, would be updated in real time. Enter client-side JavaScript and Netlify's Edge Functions.

I've written before about displaying my listening data from Apple Music but, recently, I've attempted to take things a bit further.

I took some time last week to build out a popular posts widget after seeing Zach's implementation using Google Analytics.

Up until now my now page has sourced music data from Last.fm (and may well again). But, in the interest in experimenting a bit, I've tried my hand at rewriting that part of the page to leverage data from Apple Music, using MusicKit.js instead.

In the interest of over-engineering my personal site I've gone out of my way to optimize it for performance. It started out fairly quick as it's static, built using Eleventy and is hosted with Vercel but, beyond the basic setup, I've taken some additional measures to drive the pagespeed scores to 100 across the board.

I dropped in a quick update to my now page to display the 5 most recent articles from my favorites feed in Matter.

My talk from the Eleventy meetup about building my now page (you even get to see how much I resemble my avatar).

After posting and discussing my post from yesterday with Nicolas Hoizey I decided to explore his suggested path and explore using a GitHub action to handle posts to Mastodon, rather than Make.

I've relaunched, rebuilt and rewritten my personal blog more times than I can count, and I've had a trail of posts I've never fully migrated at each turn. This weekend, while relaxing and watching movies I ported them into Eleventy and, in doing so, found that the pagination implementation I was using didn't scale well with the number of pages I added.

I've discussed building a now page using Eleventy, but I also syndicate a subset of that content out to Mastodon using @11ty/eleventy-activity-feed and Make.

dotenv-flow:

dotenv-flow extends dotenv adding the ability to have multiple .env* files like .env.development, .env.test and .env.production, also allowing defined variables to be overwritten individually in the appropriate .env*.local file.

The Eleventy docs recommend the dotenv package for working with .env files[^1], but I've found dotenv-flow to be a bit more useful inasmuch as support for .env* file patterns make development more convenient.

In an effort to get away from client-side Javascript and embrace Eleventy for what it is (a static site generator), I've dropped my social-utils instance offline and my now-playing track display on my home page that still relied on it.

As part of my commitment to writing about things I've written in other frameworks in Eleventy, this is how I re-engineered my /now page in Eleventy.

In the interest of continuing to repeat myself I'm writing, once again, about adding webmentions to a blog.