Back in 2017 I wrote my own static site generator in Node to replace a slow, clunky Jekyll setup. It worked, but in 2018 I discovered Eleventy and immediately preferred its simplicity. I rebuilt around it and created a small starter with sane defaults that I could reuse across projects.
That starter ended up doing more than I expected. I used it for all sorts of builds, including a one-pass archive of more than 60,000 news articles that now sit indefinitely in S3. Along the way I learned a lot about Eleventy’s internals and quirks, and I enjoyed the whole process.
Over time my work shifted. These days I spend far more time in Dart and Flutter, PHP backends, and AWS architecture. I still care about frontend, but the ecosystem has moved on, and so have I. My current frontend work lives in Astro and TypeScript instead.
So on February 7, 2026, I archived the repository.
It’s not abandoned, just finished.
The project received a final maintenance pass so it installs cleanly on current Node LTS and builds without issues. No new features, no ongoing support. It remains available as a historical reference and a snapshot of a useful period in my work.
I still think highly of Eleventy and would happily use it again when it’s the right tool. I just don’t reach for this starter anymore, and marking that honestly feels better than letting it quietly rot.
If you used the starter at any point, thanks.