Random notes to myself

In “The Other Side of Things,” I wrote about returning to art-making after a ten-year hiatus. What surprised me is that some things apparently never left.

You know me from my Metalsmith work - static site generators, component architectures, the case for simplicity over framework churn. That’s one side of what I do. There’s another, and it’s been part of my life longer than web development.

The bilingual site needed proper SEO. In Eleventy, template-driven generation can accomplish everything—SEO markup is just HTML with specific patterns.

With the art website running on Eleventy, I wanted to add something I'd never implemented in Metalsmith: a full bilingual version with proper language switching and SEO markup.

In theory, migrating a site from Metalsmith to Eleventy should be straightforward. Theory met practice when I ported my art website.

It turned out I hadn't created a Metalsmith component library. I'd created a Nunjucks component library that happened to run on Metalsmith.

I recently rebuilt my art website using Eleventy, and I want to share why I made that shift and what it looked like in practice.

Static site generators produce a frozen snapshot of your content at build time. Here is how to add scheduled publishing using a date-based plugin and automated daily builds.

From blog series to living infrastructure. The Metalsmith Component Library has grown, and we're building a SKILL that lets Claude guide beginners through creating real websites.

Existing search plugins for Metalsmith are ancient—most are effectively abandoned. This new metalsmith plugin uses Fuse.js as the foundation

Metalsmith Redux began with a simple premise: amid framework overload, reintroduce Metalsmith as an example of stability and simplicity in an ecosystem obsessed with complexity.

Building a Metalsmith plugin with Claude revealed that effective AI collaboration isn't about prompt engineering—it's about exploring problems through dialogue until solutions emerge naturally.