Beginning a new approach to blogging with Eleventy

As foreshadowed in my last post, I've now stopped publishing with Ghost and moved to the static site generator Eleventy. I plan to write about some of the more technical aspects of how I did this in a future post, but for this one I want to explain broadly what I've done, and why.

The 'classic' case for, and explanation of, modern static site generators was made by Matt Biilmann in Smashing Magazine back in 2015. For Biilmann, it's mostly about performance, but for me it's more about control and a sense that publishing on the web has become far more complicated than it needs to be. As readers of my Marginalia series may have noticed, I've been reading and listening to a lot of stuff recently about minimal technology, and a 'brutalist' approach to web design. Publishing with a static site generator allows me to control to a much greater degree what's actually getting published, and removes a bunch of technology from the stack needed to get it onto your screen. This means that there are fewer points of failure and less things needing to be patched or upgraded.

Ironically, whilst systems like WordPress and Ghost require more configuration and maintenance than a static site, they also provide less control over the things that matter to me. Some static site generators will be more flexible than others in this regard, but part of the reason I settled on Eleventy is that it provides a very large degree of flexibility and customisation - Zach Leatherman has done a good job of ensuring his system doesn't try to do everything itself, filling a similar niche to Metalsmith but a bit less intimidating. There were four specific things I wanted total control over:

1. everything in the HEAD section generally
2. the referrer meta tag
3. the meta tags for open graph and twitter images
4. permalinks

The <head>

Most web publishing systems provide users, or at least theme creators, the ability to inject tags and scripts into the head, header and/or footer of each page. This is useful, but what's usually not possible is to remove tags that the system itself creates. This may not necessarily sound like a big deal, but it has important ramifications. Firstly, if your system automatically inserts a particular meta tag that has multiple potential values, you have to go with the value chosen by the system designers. Secondly, if they decide to insert a particular script or tag you don't want there at all, there's not much you can do. In the case of Ghost, it does both (if you share my views about best practices in web publishing).

Firstly, Ghost has baked Google AMP support into the publishing system itself: you can't not publish AMP-friendly posts using Ghost. The AMP site does a good job of hiding the fact that this is a Google project, but most of what you need to know about it is in the headings under About - Who is AMP for?. The four things listed are 'AMP for Publishers', 'AMP for Advertisers', 'AMP for Ecommerce' and 'AMP for Ad Tech Platforms'. AMP is sold as a way to improve the reader experience and speed sites up, but 'Ad Tech Platforms' (like Google) are the cause of the problem AMP is allegedly trying to solve. AMP is really about Google gaining more data and more control over publishing, and I want nothing to do with it.

Secondly, Ghost uses the referrer meta tag with the content attribute set to no-referrer-when-downgrade. This means that any link from an https site to an http site won't pass on the referer header in the http request: but if I link to an https page it still will. I want my referrer tag to be set to no-referrer, for the reasons outlined in Eric Hellman's useful post about the privacy implications of the referer header and referrer meta tag. Basically, it's nobody's business if you're reading my blog posts (more on this later).

Permalinks

I wrote a little bit about Ghost's strangely forgiving attitude to permalinks in my last post. The particular problem I had when it came to migrating my blog to a static site was that I wanted to maintain all the existing permalinks, but change the URL pattern for any new posts. In systems like WordPress and Ghost this is more or less impossible unless you start mucking around with redirects on the actual webserver. Eleventy allows me to do something pretty cool, however, and it's very simple. Each post is written in a Markdown file, and has 'front