People that keep this site going

Hollie recently moved to Eleventy, and having friends that help out and encourage you to improve is a great thing.

One of the goals of Blaugust2025 is to reply and promote other bloggers participating! This post will be one of those, yay!

I have been following Hollie for a while, since her small good things website has been such a joy to read whenever it popped up in my feeds.

At some point she rebuilt her site from scratch using HTML-only. She wasn’t a programmer and didn’t understand static site generators, so there were problems. The result of this was that all her older posts were now gone! And her new RSS feed with only a few posts showed no article content either.

I remember asking her about it, and she was struggling to keep the RSS feed updated¹ manually, so it was pretty bare bones to reduce maintenance. She was planning to bring back her archive at some point though, which made me happy.

A couple days ago, she moved to Eleventy, and I couldn’t be happier! She got a gist of how an SSG works, and she did so with the help of her friends, who have been there for support and questions she might have.

So, in the end, I’ve decided I can do this. And that it’s okay to ask friends for the absolutely inevitable help I’ll need to build/modify something using code I don’t know how to read.

People like that are a wonderful thing, so I too wanted to say thanks, to all of those who have helped me with my site in one way or another. From letting me know of any bugs, to writing guides that I’ve followed in the past, to just having cool website designs that I can copy to my own inspire me!

Honestly, there’s a lot of people and tutorials I’ve followed over the years, to change so many things in my site and improving little by little, so a big thanks to:

• Everyone who lets me know when a link I shared isn’t working! Oops!
• All the websites and bloggers I’ve referenced on previous posts about messing around with my website
• Amin, the light theme friend who notices when my CSS gets borked. And has provided plenty of other feedback too.
• Jedda helped me notice that the favicon I got is very very blurry on iOS somehow. Still working on it!
• Dusan who has written a couple of scripts to help me archive my comments section, in case I ever remove it or Mastodon goes away. I stole his avatar section too.
• Chris Wiegman because quite a bit of my blog design was initially inspired by his.
• Kev who wrote the guide and started the challenge that got me into writing at all!

There is a lot of other people who have reached out multiple times, when my RSS feeds breaks, when some image or text goes out of bounds, or when I have a typo somewhere. And a lot of others who have inspired me to improve, to write about something and to keep going on this little blogging thing I got going on.

And of course, there are some who have been kind enough to even donate to me from time to time, that’s just wild!

Well, anyway, thanks y’all, and congrats Hollie for taking the step to try a static site generator!

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/114977026358587216