Hello, World!

I rebuilt my site, partially, using Eleventy, Tailwind, and Daisy!

Over the past month or so, I've had some changes in my life. Specifically related to some friends disappearing, taking the Free Company I was part of in Final Fantasy XIV and disbanding it, and leaving myself and a few others to start anew. So I took up the torch, as it were, despite not having delusions of grandeur for a while and not really wanting to, and started putting together a new Free Company.

As part of doing that, I went through creating a charter in the game, invited friends to sign it to get the Free Company formed, and created a Discord server. What came of that is the Ashes of Amethyst Free Company. The site was just me wanting to make somewhere for people to check for information, to post some non-discord updates, and "flex" about making websites for things that no longer really need websites. The website, and somewhat by extension the Free Company, is under construction still. There aren't many, if any, pictures on the site, and as the FC ranks up and gets higher reputation levels with the Maelstrom Grand Company, the site will get updated.

But doing that led to me wanting to rebuild my own website (again) since I had decided to build the FC website with new tools that I'd not used successfully before: a Static Site Generator.

Instead of having to maintain multiple pages for the sidebar, navbar, footer, and more, I just create templates for each of them and it somewhat functions like PHP, where pages are "generated" with all the information you asked it to include, pulling the data from multiple sources. The difference, however, is that SSGs pull the templates, insert data into them from "static" files like the one that generates this page, and then creates a static HTML page for the webserver to serve istead of having the page be generated on the fly.

In building that site, I learned a few new tricks and tools, which spurred me on to build this site! There were some challenges, particularly in that I wanted to make this a blog of sorts in addition to a personal website, and using the template that I had chosen, I had to take code from a starter project for Eleventy, insert it into the template, which was broken up into mulitple files for the variety of elements (header/nav, footer, base, etc.), and then make it all work again. Was I successful?

Sort-of.

It's working now, as you might be able to see here, but I have yet to figure out a good way to deploy the site from my computer, and there's a few other things that I'm working on "fixing" or changing from the starter project I used for the sake of making it work better. I'll probably post updates here, where applicable and relevant, and I'll probably Toot or Tweet (or both) about the updates on Mastodon or Twitter, respectively, when I remember to. Maybe I'll end up setting up a Github Action or something to post a link to social media when I make a new post.

Either way, That's what I have as an update for now, and I hope you enjoyed reading this. Please stay tuned for more updates as time goes on!