Site Meta Notes 2026

The good

I bid a fond fairwell to Publii, a static web site platform, which has served me well for so long in favor of a return to 11ty for a single solitary reason: it got too bloaty. In the process this site has gone from > 350MB of content to just under 40MB.

Publii was itself an improvement over WordPress, which required too much vigilence in keeping plugins updated, and the flexibility was as poor as Publii in terms of how I could maintain and export data, configure layouts, etc.

The bad

The down side in changing over to 11ty is I have many posts yet to transfer into markdown files, but will be worth it.

Custom automations

I have also coded up simple JavaScript helpers on my MacBook Terminal app to:

• generate a new post template;
• take any markdown posts using img tags rather than figure tags to update them to figure tags;
• generate an og:image automatically from the first image on a page, so my meta tag is ready for any social media sharing; and
• upload the site using rsync using ./push.sh, which runs “build:all”: “npx @11ty/eleventy && npm run og:image && npm run build:index”, the last command building the site’s search index.

For future use

I have a secure directory built in for anything I’d like to keep from being archived or consumed by AI bots.