Brian's Website

How I Made this Website

I am not qualified to teach you how to make a website. I am not a programmer or developer or anything like that. If you are making your first website, HTML For People by Blake Watson is the best place to start. After working through HTML for People, I found Eleventy. I'm using Eleventiy to generate this website. Before using Eleventy, I strongly recommend Zach Leatherman's great video 6 Minutes to Build a Blog from Scratch with Eleventy and Stephanie Eckles' fantastic class, Builld an Eleventy (11ty) Site from Scratch. Stephanie's website, 11ty Rocks!, well, rocks! The Learn Eleventy project is outstanding, even if their scope is quite a bit broader than what I needed. 11tybundle.dev shares the latest and greatest. Finally, but importantly, the folks at the 11ty Discord server have been welcoming, kind, and helpful - sometimes going out of their way to help me. I appreciate them very much.

This is what I did...

Installed Eleventy, Made an Index Page
The prelimiary steps for creating this website.
Made a Base Template with CSS, Header, and Footer
Established some basic structure.
Added a Navigation Bar and How To Page
This adds a navigation bar, shows how pages are added to the navigation bar, and creats a How To page.
Added Date Fiters
Before setting up a blog, this will make dates display correctly.
Made a Blog
These steps strucure the blog and make posts appear on the home page.
Made a "Back to Top" Button
This makes a button that appears when you scroll down in a page to get back to the top of the page.
Made Images Work
This creates a folder for images and passes them through to the website.
Homepage Adjustments
This Limits the number of posts on the homepage and adds a post tag list.
Added an Atom (RSS) Feed
This adds a feed for subscribing to the blog.
Made an All Posts Page
This makes a blog index page to display all posts.
Turned the How To Page Into a Blog
This makes the How To page organized and readable.
Made a Github Repository
Created a repository as a way to back up the website's files and undo big mistakes.