Mixed nuts #17

Here we go once again with an entry in my “Mixed nuts” series of posts, each of which contains musings on multiple topics that have recently occupied my semi-reasonable facsimile of a brain.

Perhaps soon we’ll be referring to “the static site generator formerly known as Eleventy,” at least in jest, but it will be true. Eleventy’s creator, Zach Leatherman, announced earlier this month that the SSG now will be called Build Awesome. You may recall that this open-source project came under the aegis of Font Awesome in 2024, apparently settling any remaining worries about Eleventy’s long-term financial sustainability. Despite the name change, Build Awesome will remain free. However, there also will be a paid “Pro” version that will add more features; exactly which features, and what the Pro package will cost, remain TBA. (An earlier announcement, containing more details, was removed.) Also, Leatherman promised to keep future versions as backward-compatible as possible with existing Eleventy sites and the current ecosphere of Eleventy plugins.

My Linux-on-the-old-Mac adventures continue. Now, after about a year and a half on Fedora, I’m running the Arch-based CachyOS distribution. Its purpose is to provide the flexibility of Arch Linux, but with greater ease of use plus — and this is what got me to try it — special enhancements to optimize performance. It’s early, but I’ve been quite pleased with CachyOS. It seems to have many of the aspects I preferred about Arch compared to Fedora, such as far faster mirrors when it’s update time, yet without my having to tinker quite so much to keep things running smoothly.

While I was starting to draft this post, the Hugo team released v.0.158.0, the most interesting new feature (IMHO) of which is called css.Build. As the documentation says, css.Build lets you “bundle, transform, and minify CSS resources” — which, up to now, I’ve been using a combination of PostCSS plugins and bespoke code to do, especially in production. Now, Hugo can do all those things on its own! Indeed, after spending a couple of hours fixing a few things in my existing layout files, I was able to go Hugo-only for handling the site’s styling even in production. If you’re a fellow Hugo user, I suggest you view the docs and see if you might be similarly interested.¹

I recently put aside this site’s Sass files after realizing I had little or no remaining reason to keep maintaining them. Sass long ago lost its main advantage for me over vanilla CSS, namely the nesting that became native to the latter years ago; so continuing to keep around the Sass versions of my CSS files, much less having to change them for consistency’s sake every time I edited their CSS counterparts, had ceased to be anything other than a nuisance.

The growing weight of “you-must-use-AI-no-matter-what” demands upon developers by various firms’ IT overseers makes me ever gladder that I retired well before the craze ramped up to today’s cacophonous level. My final job was mainly managing websites and the servers on which they were living, so I might have escaped the worst of the madness at first, but that relative calm wouldn’t have lasted. After all, when a company spends big bucks to make a Thing available to its IT team, the folks on that IT team had better-by-God be using the Thing if they know what’s good for them.

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