THE Eleventy Meetup Feb 20th

Last week we had a great event at THE Eleventy Meetup.

Building a meetup community site using Global Data Files, Juhis

Video / Slides

I had the pleasure to give the first talk of the year. In January, I wrote a blog post Community websites with Eleventy and when Cory asked if I’d be interested in talking in the event, I knew what to talk about. This gave me a good reason to think about the topic a bit more.

I’m a big fan of Eleventy (have been since 2018!) and in this talk I talked about how I have built websites for Turku ❤️ Frontend and archipylago utilizing Eleventy’s Global Data Files feature.

Calendar, event history, sponsors, team and speaker hall of fame all live in JSON files in _data/ folder and can be used in any template across the project.

I also talked a bit about the pros and cons of using Global Data Files versus using a Content Management System. The main point I make is: JSON files offer a horrible content editing experience but have zero extra dependencies to third party services while CMSs usually are the opposite.

Using Eleventy to Gobble Up Everything I Do Online, Robb Knight

Video / Blog post

Robb’s work has been a big inspiration for me over the past months and it was great to share the stage with him.

Robb delivered a great talk about how he uses Eleventy to showcase a variety of collections on his website like his game and lego collection, a media tracking blog, a link blog, a full archive of his mastodon posts, plus webmentions, now page, and everything else in between.

He has built echo that can read RSS feeds and write that data to various places with webhooks. For example, he uses that to pull in his movie reviews from Letterboxd into his website. Echo then picks that change up and posts it to Mastodon which is pretty cool.

Robb goes through a couple of more examples like that in the talk as well, I highly recommend watching the talk and adding Robb’s blog to your RSS reader.

Next talk, maybe by you?

THE Eleventy Meetup is always looking for speakers. They have an always-open call for proposals and are very welcoming to first-time speakers. The community is lovely and very supporting and it would be cool to see more talks about Eleventy topics.

If you’re not quite sure what you could talk about, I recently wrote a blog post with some ideas for talk topics.