Hello there! Thanks for choosing my template, and diving into setup with me. This guide seems intimidatingly long, but that’s because I am trying to make it thorough with the idea that you have little to no prior coding experience.

If you’re new to code, I know it seems spooky, but I promise you it’s going to be alright! I once was scare of code too, and panicked any time I got a blank screen or something went wrong. Now I understand it is just a puzzle that needs to be solved— and one that you are encouraged to take breaks from as necessary. Nearly nothing you do can’t be undone if needed, and I will try to guide you through this as smoothly as possible.

TIP : There is this belief amongst the non-coding public, and sadly even among some snooty developers, that people who code are special or better-than. They are not. I had a friend once says that “coders are just like plumbers— we just happen to know where to bang on the pipes”. They too once made plenty of mistakes like we will (and probably still do!).

What is eleventy?

Eleventy (or also spelled 11ty), is a static site generator. You know how if you make pages in just html/css, to make a new similar page you copy the entire code all over again, and just change the relavent bits? Well, think of 11ty as automating that for us. We set up layouts/template code that contain the code that we would be copy/pasting as is, and then in the future only deal with updating the content.

There are some more advantages I won’t go too deeply into in the interest of brevity, but they are generally more secure and speedy, and they spit out html/css/javascript, so if you’re careful about what you use javascript for, the core site functions just fine without it (why is this important?).

Note: My template does use a bit of javascript in the rendered site, but they are for what I consider “add on” features, like a comment section, and navigating pages with the keyboard arrowkeys. Having these is nice, but does not take away from/break the “core” experience of reading the comic and site pages.