Website goes to 11(ty)

est.

I’ve been playing around with Nunjucks and various static site generators (SSGs) over the last couple of years now. Building my smaller non-CMSy sites seasonal.today, richholman.com, phonebox.photos using a mixture of techniques and build scripts.

I’ve loved it, its’s like olden days web development, HTML, CSS, Javascript but with super powers. Gulp scripts taking the mundane tasks such as image resizing and optimisation, favicon generation, script and styles pre and post processing and much more.

Around a year ago (I think, pandemics have destroyed my concept of time) I started to use 11ty after playing around the edges for a while. It’s even more of a delight, it get’s out of the way, taking care of all the hard stuff so wonderfully. Local and remote data becomes such an easy thing. It’s concept of ‘collections’ is excellent, here’s my content type based on a local data file (say an object) or remote fetch (API, graphQL), here’s the template I want it to use and voila here’s the output.

A list of folders

You can use Nunjucks natively (or Liquid, Markdown, Moustache, Handlebars and more). Passing front matter into the markdown files allows for page / folder specific variables.

Anyhoo, after converting a couple of my sites to 11ty seasonal.today and phonebook.photos both with data defined locally I wanted to try out something I’ve been meaning to do for a while….headless WordPress 💪.

And where better (and safer) to start than this blog as the source data.

There was a bit faffing about but I took a lot of inspiration from these articles / repos: How to use 11ty with Headless WordPress and deploy to Netlify, WordPress & Eleventy part one: WordPress, 11ty-wordpress-graphql.

So I now have a mirror site for this blog all built in 11ty. 11ty.dgw.ltd

I’ve blocked search engines from indexing it obvs. I tried to have the smallest footprint for it as well, so no client-side JS, 26KB of CSS. I even used some Tailwind (don’t generally like it, too many class names for this ageing brain) but I really liked this approach to typography. Just using the classname ‘prose’ on the container. Nice. I eschewed my goto build using Gulp and just do it all the build with npm built-in scripts.

I would like to trigger a build of the site when I hit publish on a post from WordPress, but given I post about once a decade running npm run build and git add commit push is not exactly a big deal.

Update: I rebuilt the 11ty instance and now this post, in a sort of hall of mirrors type afair, exists on the 11ty instance. 👻👻👻

18

est.

This is blog is now officially old enough to drink, so dogwonder.co.uk is off to the pub for a shandy.

Where did all the years go eh? That also means this is 18 years of WordPress – although this wasn’t my first WP site but not far off. I think this started on version 1.2, and here I am publishing this from a ‘smart phone’ using ’the block editor’ (back in my day it was all fields etc).

Anyhoo we’re (?) off to raise glass.

Till 19.

Lockdown project 3 – phonebox.photos

est.

So after lockdown project 1 and project 2 I wanted a new project for tiered semi-lockdown and lockdown 3.

During and since art college I’ve always been fascinated by the mundane and how in society and culture we have objects that are present but we don’t really ‘see’ them.

For the new project I turned to photography, last year I purchased a secondhand Fujifilm X100s (approaching 10 years old but still a cracking camera). I wanted a certain look to my shots and the almost filmic quality of the X100s really appealed. Also something that I could do locally whilst taking in some exercise on walks during lockdown.

The subject I wanted to focus on was phone boxes. Not the classic London ones designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (although I have made some exceptions), no I am talking about the more ‘modern’ ones. The ones that have become part of the street furniture, but ignored, looked through, abandoned. No-one seems to use them anymore (certainly not through choice or necessarily for their original purpose), the almost ubiquitous proliferation of mobile phones has rendered them obsolete and relics of the past. But they remain, unloved, mistreated, empty, lonely and I’ve found an almost melancholy beauty in their ugliness.

These decaying fixtures of the streets are probably not going to be around for ever, British Telecom and New World Telephones are gradually replacing them with electronic posters with a phone attached. However due to a High Court judgement in 2018 it is not a decision they can make now without local authority permission.

As such many remain in stasis, gradually deteriorating, occupying a little pocket of land on which they slowly atrophy. They remind us of a time before modern technology, a time of reversing the charges for calling home to ask for a lift. Prank calls. Sheltering from the rain. Turning into a superhero. They hold memories. As the uncaring march of technology relentlessly moves on they recede from our consciousness and the physical realm. Some of the phone boxes I have taken photos of have already been removed and many more will have their reign bought to an end soon. We probably won’t miss them, or even notice they have gone. But they are here, sure they have seen better days, but for me there is a quiet, determined, fading connection to a different epoch.

So through a desire to catalogue these fading objects I formally present to you:

phonebox.photos

2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2017 2016 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004