When I built the Friends with Beer podcast website, I built it using Eleventy, a JavaScript based static site generator. It’s Node.js based, which is great because it gives great flexibility in adding functionality and in development and build script options. Eleventy has a lot of great features that combine to allow flexible customization quickly and easily, so much so that the documentation understates just how powerful it is. I’ve had more than a few discovery moments along the way where I realized how much more there is to this framework than I suspected.

One of the neat things about playing with modern static site generators is that so much of the web development community who use SSGs for performance reasons also think about things like image optimization and overall site performance and overhead. It’s through my experiments with Eleventy that I learned about modern image optimization techniques and the img srcset and picture tags. …

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