Migrating From 11ty

...to Build Awesome. Apologies for the clickbait, but let me explain my take on the current state of the project formerly known as 11ty and why I eventually decided not to jump ship.

Toward the start of May, I found myself on the 11ty documentation site, where I was greeted with an obnoxious popup and a massive banner telling me to back a Kickstarter for Build Awesome Pro. Naturally, none of this made any sense to me, and it made even less sense as I looked through the Kickstarter page and couldn't tell what Build Awesome Pro was even supposed to be.

Apparently I had missed a memo from the beginning of March. Back in 2024, 11ty had been acquired by Font Awesome, the company behind... Font Awesome. This year, they apparently decided to integrate the project further into their ecosystem, including a rebrand to Build Awesome and the launch of Build Awesome Pro, a site builder presumably built off of the 11ty codebase.

I'm still not 100% sure what the goal of Build Awesome Pro is compared to every other site builder out there, nor am I sure what it means for the future of the project formerly known as 11ty. What I do know is that I don't appreciate the commercialization of open-source, nor have I built much respect for Font Awesome over the years.

I did start looking for alternatives. In particular, Astro seemed like a good fit. It supports Markdown out of the box and lets me use JavaScript for configuration and customization. There are some downsides; it uses a lot of JSX syntax that I would have to get used to, and I would need to switch to MDX to get some of the functionality that I currently get from my custom Liquid shortcodes, which would make it a bit more difficult to continue writing in Obsidian.

So, rather than spending weekends of my time completely rebuilding the site, I decided to just stick with what I have. There are some limitations 11ty has that maybe could be solved by switching to Astro, but they're fairly low-priority at the moment. As long as Font Awesome keeps letting Zach Leatherman spearhead the project formerly known as 11ty, I think I'm okay with continuing to use it.

Astro still isn't off the table. There are plugins for Obsidian to make it recognize MDX files, and I have been considering moving from Bootstrap to fully custom CSS; a rewrite of the site would be the perfect opportunity for that. With that said, for the time being, I plan on sticking with the project formerly known as 11ty once 4.0 comes out. Never say never, but I think I'll just stick with what I know unless something drastically changes.