Until recently, I've been using GitHub Actions to trigger builds on my website, but this approach meant that builds for the site were only run once a day and that I couldn't schedule specific times for posts to go live. In February of this year, Netlify announced Scheduled Functions
, and one of the use cases that I'd seen mentioned was scheduling builds.
When version 1.0.0 of Eleventy was released, one of the features that I was excited to see was the ability to add global data through configuration. This means that plugins can now add global data, and I saw it as a great opportunity to move my webmentions code into a plugin for others to use!
While I was rebuilding my website in Eleventy, I saw Amber Wilson's article about adding Webmentions to her site
shared on Twitter. I'd heard of Webmentions but I'd never really looked into them and while I was reading Amber's post, I thought that it's a really cool idea and added them to the list of things I wanted to add to my site.
Ever since I gave Eleventy
a go when I was building the LeedsJS
website, I've been a huge fan and advocate, even convincing some people to give it a try out of my sheer enthusiasm for it. I absolutely love the simplicity and flexibility of it, as well as things like data files. I have a whole post talking about this stuff from when I was building the new LeedsJS website.
I've been meaning to convert my own site over for a while, and recently took the plunge and decided to do it. As well as giving me the opportunity to dig into Eleventy without a deadline pressing me, it also gave me the chance to make some stylistic changes.
A couple of weeks ago an idea popped into my head, I built it in a few hours and today, as it's a bank holiday, I'm launching it into the world!