This is a big update for my blog because it is about changing the blogging engine, which is currently Aurora. Last year, I started taking blogging seriously after I learned about blogging engines that can be used to create custom-built blogs. The first one I encountered was Blosxom, a Perl script-based blogging engine. It was fun to play around with it, but due to a lack of active development and my unwillingness to learn, I abandoned it for its Python cousin, Pyblosxom. Although it was an improvement over Blosxom, my enthusiasm for it didn’t last long, especially after discovering Aurora, which supports programming in HTML pages. You can read this transition here and here.

The main drawback of Aurora is that it’s not always easy to modify the source code because it is made for personal use. On top of it, there is no documentation available for this code. So, despite it being so powerful, I was a bit unhappy with this code. Also, there is no way to generate RSS feed except using Granary.

I wonder why I was jumping so fast from one blogging engine/platform to another? The reason, I feel, was my curiosity and impatience, especially when I discover creative designs of others’ blogs. In the Indieblog community, there are so many wonderful people who have custom designs for their blogs. Most of them are not hosting their blog on any commercial platform such as WordPress or Blogger but have built them by using a blogging engine. Among so many blogs I admired, some of the most impressive designs are Ava, James, Anh, Robb, and Hackdias. Whenever I find something interesting in someone else’s blog, I immediately want to adopt it. But my previous blogging engines were resticting me from implementing new design ideas on my blog.

This led me to search for a better blogging engine that can fulfill my needs. In the past few months, I had heard about 11ty from many bloggers whose blog designs are impressive. So I thought to give it a try. It is written in GO (completely unfamiliar to me), but as a user, I do not need to deal with it at all. Thanks to Aurora–for making me familiar with Jinja–this sswitch to 11ty was a piece of cake. I am still working on it, and after spending a couple of hours, I am happy to report that the most complicated part is already implemented, and my first impression of it is really good. I can import a module directly into my code that can parse a text written in Markdown or JSON. I will post about the complete experience in the next post, but I guess, you know it will be mostly appreciation of 11ty.