About

The Brutalist Blog Site Built & Designed By Muhamad D. R.

A blog site to store thoughts and ideas. Built and designed solely by yours truly. It stays true to itself. An entity that is an inhabitant of the web. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and everything in between bundled together. It's ugly, brutal, a dead simple site, a sore to the eyes, but having no more than is really needed.

Table of Contents

Introduction

A starter project to rebuild miayam.github.io from the ground up using Eleventy and friends. It is a foundation on which new miayam.io will be built. Removing Jekyll entirely from the code base 💩.

What do I need more of in a brutalist website?

  • A simple design, component based design that's easy to change and work with. It doesn't have to be React, Angular, Vue, or Svelte
  • Performance. A super fast jellyfish. 100% lighthouse score
  • SEO

Therefore, this starter project must be:

Boring

I believe in boring technology. Shiny new technology will be obselete in no time, but boring tech will not. Pug for building presentational component. SCSS for styling. Vanilla JS for manipulating the DOM, scripting repetitive tasks, and configuration.

Atomic

Atomic Design is a way to go. It makes the design modular that can be easily managed and updated. Thanks to Daniel Tonon for this great article. He encourages us to combine modified BEM naming convention with atomic design methodology. He also wrote pros and cons for his approach and let us decide and manage the trade-off.

Here's the file structure:

src
└── components
    ├── atoms
    |    └── button
    |       ├── index.pug
    |       ├── _index.scss
    |       └── index.js
    |── molecules
    |── organisms
    └── templates

components is an entry point in which Eleventy looks for layouts.

As Few Assets As Possible

Webpack is a bundle manager for this project. Any changes to components/templates/**/*/index.js or components/templates/**/*/_index.scss is watched and rebuilt by Webpack. Webpack bundles JavaScript and SCSS code in multiple entry points reside in components/templates which will be injected on every template by HtmlWebpackPlugin. Eleventy will do the rest.

Here's the file structure:

src
└── components 
    ├── atoms
    ├── molecules
    ├── organisms
    └── templates
         ├── base
         |  └── index.pug
         ├── 404
         |  ├── index.pug
         |  ├── _index.scss
         |  └── index.js
         └── home
            ├── index.pug
            ├── _index.scss
            └── index.js

Here's the snippet from webpack.common.js:

const ENTRY_POINTS = [
    'home',
    '404'
];

const multipleHtmlPlugins = ENTRY_POINTS.map(name => {
    return new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
        template: `${basePath}/components/templates/base/index.pug`,
        filename: `${basePath}/components/templates/${name}/index.pug`,
        chunks: [`${name}`],
        inject: false,
        hash: true,
        templateParameters: {
            // For now, disable analytics for
            // starter project landing page
            analytics: name !== 'home'
        }
    });
});

module.exports = {
    entry: ENTRY_POINTS.reduce((prev, curr) => {
        return {
            ...prev,
            [curr]: `./src/components/templates/${curr}/index.js`
        }
    }, {}),
    plugins: [
        ...multipleHtmlPlugins,
        ... // The rest.
    ]
    ... // The rest.
};

Here's how we inject assets on base template (components/templates/base/index.pug):

body
    //- Inject assets. 6 spaces is necessary, so that `HtmlWebpackPugPlugin` can
    //- translate this snippet to proper pug syntax.
    <%= htmlWebpackPlugin.files.css.map((css) => (
       `link(href=\'${css}\', rel='stylesheet')`).join('\n      ')`
    )) %>
    <%= htmlWebpackPlugin.files.js.map((js) => (
        `script(src=\'${js}\', type='text/javascript', async)`).join('\n      ')`
    )) %>

As a result, each template will have distinct minified, production-ready assets that are only required by pages that include it. The assets required by the Home page will not be loaded by the About page. As few assets as possible.

Usage

Requirement

You must install volta. You will be using Node.js version 12.18.4.

Run this command to make sure volta can detect package.json:

$ source ~/.bashrc

Development

Install all dependencies:

$ npm run install

After that, run this command:

$ npm run start

Webpack bundles the assets, Eleventy will do the rest.

Open localhost:1992 to see the result.

Production

To build production-ready bundle, run this command:

$ npm run build

You can host it on Github Pages, Netlify, or else.

Special Thanks

The Reason Why I Migrate From Jekyll to Eleventy

At first, miayam.io was a personal blog site built with Jekyll using a theme I picked carelessly without thinking. Two years later, I almost forgot half of the code. Ruby seemed foreign to me. The more I tinkered with it, the more befuddled I was. So, I decided to burn it down and rebuild it from the ground up.

I was looking for an alternative to Jekyll written in JavaScript because I am a boring web developer—the kind you can find anywhere else. I tried Gatsby and wound up getting bored. All those shiny new technologies Gatsby has to offer were not really what I need. I tried Hexo. It had a similar ambiance to Jekyll but it didn't spark joy.

And then, there was Eleventy.

It really was like a magical glove that just fit my brain perfectly. It did one thing, and did it well. A simple SSG (Static Site Generator) that helped provide the barebones of the next generation of miayam.io. And for good reason, the batteries were not included.

The Author

You can find me on GitHub, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.