Building My Own Site from the Ground Up (Part 2: Getting Things Running)

A quick recap — the tech stack I ended up using for this site is Eleventy (11ty) with the WebC templating engine, and DaisyUI for styling.

Setting everything up was straightforward, much like any other modern web project. I used pnpm to initialize a new project, install the dependencies, and create the necessary folders and files.

Configuring Eleventy was smooth too, thanks to the clear documentation from both Eleventy and DaisyUI. Most of it worked right out of the box.

The real challenge came when I started experimenting with WebC. Maybe it’s just me thinking too much in a React way, but getting used to how WebC handles templating took some time. I wanted to build a breadcrumb system for my blog posts (like this one) and tried using the built-in eleventyNavigationBreadcrumb filter from the navigation plugin — but I just couldn’t get it to behave the way I expected. Even Claude didn’t have much luck helping me debug it.

I suspect the issue was more about how I approached the problem rather than WebC itself. But oh well — no breadcrumbs for now.

On a brighter note, I finally got my own domain name! 🎉 Setting it up through Cloudflare was surprisingly simple, and with the help of a few GitHub Actions, everything now deploys automatically. That’s a topic I’ll probably dive into another time.

For now, I’m just happy to have the site running and slowly taking shape — one small win at a time.