Friday, June 19, 2026
My 11ty experiment has turned into a time travel story
I took another stab at creating an 11ty site, and this time succeeded. Not only that, but I’ve decided to grow the Neocities blog I made into a work of fiction complete with story and character arc.
There are many 11ty tutorials, but the one that caught my eye was this one from Flamed Fury:
Create A Static Site Using 11ty & Deploy to Neocities (2026 Refresh)
Along with some help from Claude and a few other tutorials, I got the site up and running on Neocities. It’s pretty close to the way I want it, but there will likely be more tinkering. The design, for example, is still not far off from the one in the tutorial.
Would I recommend 11ty? If you’re into coding and don’t mind a challenge, I would say it’s worth a look. I think WordPress gave databases a bad reputation in terms of security, so the flat file system in static site generators has been gaining popularity. On the other hand, PHP/MySQL alternatives to WordPress do exist. I’ve been using Textpattern for 20 years without any problems.
Anyway, the fun part is the site I created — Misfit Gentleman. It started as a way to put in some filler content, but the more I did it, the more I became attached to the character I had created. I wanted to give him a background.
Soon I realized that he had a problem. And a character with a problem creates tension that needs to be resolved through the telling of a story.
His problem is that he has travelled 200 years into his future and our present. And he would like to go back, but doesn’t know how.
This will be chronicled through blog posts, but there will also be updates to other pages — home, about, links and contact — as he learns more.
My goal is to wrap this up by the end of the year. After that, Misfit Gentleman can stand alone as a story, sort of like a book on a shelf.
More posts in the Coding category
