Static sites enable a good time travel experience

Varun wrote about gamifying blogging and personal website maintenance which reminded me of the time when I awarded myself some badges for blogging.

I mentioned this to Varun who asked if I had any screenshots of what it looked like on my website. My initial answer was “no”, then I looked at Wayback Machine but there were not pictures of the badges.

Then, a bit later it hit me. I don’t need any archived screenshots: my website is built with Eleventy and it's static so I can check out a git commit from the time I had those badges up, fire up Eleventy and see the website — as it was in the spring of 2021.

That’s a beauty of a static site generator combined with my workflow of fetching posts from CMS before build time so each commit contains a full snapshot of the website.

Comparing this to a website that uses a database for posts (like WordPress) or a flow where posts from CMS are not stored in version control but rather fetched at build time only, my solution makes time travel to (almost) any given moment in time a two-command operation (git checkout with the right commit hash and @11ty/eleventy serve to serve a dev server). I say almost because back in the day I wasn’t quite as diligent in commiting every change as I was deploying manually and not through version control automation.

A year ago, inspired by Alex Chan’s blog post Taking regular screenshots of my website I set up a GitHub Action that takes a snapshot of my front page once a month to keep a record. At the time, I felt bit sad that I hadn’t started it before. However, now that I realised how easy it is for me to go back in time thanks to Eleventy and git, I’m not so worried anymore. Maybe I should do a collage of changes on my design one day by going through my project history.

One more major point for static site generators!