iNKOBAN Forums

Welcome to iNKOBAN Forums. These rules exist to keep things civil and productive. They are short because I trust you to be a reasonable person.

General Rules

1. Listen when others are talking.
2. Follow directions.
3. Keep your feet flat on the floor.
4. Show respect for school and personal property.
5. Show respect for the learning environment and to each other.
6. Work and play in a safe manner.
7. muahaha

~ androong, king of the Britons, defeater of the Saxons, sovereign of all England

TODO

Edit: muahaha

Welcome, androong! You are member #1. Congratulations on your achievement.

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thank you bigly

It's done. The whole site runs on Eleventy now. Every page, every post, every little silly billy fiddly-bits (the stats, mostly)... all of it goes through the build pipeline and comes out the other side as flat HTML. I don't have to edit four different places like a caveman for some small superficial detail anymore.¹

why 11ty

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another... they've got to figure out what compiler to pick. I knew on the outset that I could NOT hardcode blogposts anymore. Anyways, here's what I've figured out: Hugo is fast but the templating felt alien. Astro is cool but heavier than what I needed. 11ty is out of the way. Muahaha.

Feed it templates and data and it gives you a site. You put stuff in, stuff comes out. Since I like the way I do things, I want to keep the way I do things. Waow.

what actually changed

• Layouts: one base layout, page-specific blocks. The navbar lives in exactly one place now so I don't need to change everything forever and ever.
• Blog posts: markdown files!!! I love Markdown. I use Obsidian a lot and I'm tired of doing "<i>" instead of doing "_text_" It's a .md file. 11ty turns it into a forum thread and I don't have to touch the HTML.
• Data files: project lists, changelogs, all that stuff lives in _data/ and gets "compiled" at the build time, so, again, I don't have to edit the HTML.

Were there things that broke along the way? I'm not really sure.

was it worth it

I don't know. The site was getting to the point where every small change meant editing multiple files and hoping I didn't forget one. Now I edit a template or a data file and the whole thing rebuilds in under a second. Adding a new blog post is just creating a markdown file. Adding a new project is just adding an object to a JS array. But... now I can't claim the site to be a simple static site anymore. I've got a fat, chunky site. Miserable, that situation is.

The migration itself was a few days of work, but the payoff is already obvious. I can actually iterate on things now without dreading the manual labor. waow

But i think the REAL 11ty migration was the .njk we made along the way :-)

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I was, in fact editing small, superficial details across six files like a caveman :-(

One of my favorite web design problems is making a very small area feel intentional instead of cramped. ¹

I keep ending up back at little boxed-off zones with loud borders, obvious headings, and a dumb amount of hierarchy packed into them. Forum sidebars. game menus. old portal widgets. weird status panels. all that good junk.

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"intentional" here means the box looks like somebody meant to make it this weird, not like the page got trapped in a vending machine.

Writing a blog in 2026 that looks like a phpBB forum from 2003 is a little ridiculous - I'm aware!

I don't know - there's just something here. There's something about it that makes me go "waow" and enjoy it more than I would a Substack or Medium page.¹ Don't get me wrong, they're not bad, but...

There's just something that isn't right about them. I'm looking to make my own implementation, with my own quirks and my own style. I want to build it by hand, and I want it to look like this. Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's the joy of building something from scratch, maybe it's just the fact that I can. Who knows?

More posts coming whenever I get around to it!

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It feels less like publishing through a service and more like leaving a weird object on my own desk for other people to walk over and inspect.

Blog is live. Posts go here now. I'm still working on getting a proper feed going so new entries show up on the main page automatically, but for now this is it. Muahaha, 11ty.

Expect posts about web stuff, systems programming, and whatever else I feel like writing about. No promises on schedule.

Why is this styled like a forum post and not like a Medium or Substack? Because I wanted it to! That's about it. I like this style and it's much more fun to build than a standard blog layout.¹ I want to have fun with this, and this is the way I want to do it. Plus, it gives me an excuse to build out all the forum features like user cards, signatures, polls, and so on. Who doesn't want a poll in their blog post?

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Also because the forum shell is not just decorative chrome to me. It changes how the writing feels.