Part 12: How to make a collection?

Project Scope and ToDos

1. Static Site Generator that can build the blog and let me host it on Github Pages
2. I want to write posts in Markdown because I'm lazy, it's easy, and it is how I take notes now.
3. I don't want to spend a ton of time doing design work. I'm doing complicated designs for other projects, so I want to pull a theme I like that I can rely on someone else to keep up.
4. Once it gets going, I want template changes to be easy.
5. It should be as easy as Jekyll, so I need to be able to build it using GitHub Actions, where I can just commit a template change or Markdown file and away it goes. If I can't figure this out than fk it, just use Jekyll.
6. I require it to be used by a significant percent of my professional peers so I can get easy answers when something goes wrong.
7. I want source maps. This is a dev log site which means whatever I do with it should be easy for other developers to read.

• Also the sitemap plugin looks cool. Should grab that later.

• So does the reading time one.

• Also this TOC plugin mby?

• Use Data Deep Merge in this blog.

• Decide if I want to render the CSS fancier than just a base file and do per-template splitting.

• Is there a way to have permalinks to posts contain metadata without organizing them into subfolders?

• How do I cachebreak files on the basis of new build events? Datetime? site.github.build_revision is how Jekyll accomplishes this, but is there a way to push that into the build process for Eleventy?

• Make link text look less shitty. It looks like it is a whole, lighter, font.

• Code blocks do not have good syntax highlighting. I want good syntax highlighting.

• Build a Markdown-it plugin to take my typing shortcuts [prob, b/c, ...?] and expand them on build.

• See if we can start Markdown's interpretation of H tags to start at 2, since H1 is always pulled from the page title metadata. If it isn't easy, I just have to change my pattern of writing in the MD documents.

• Should I explore some shortcodes?

Day 12

Ok, I'd like to have a custom collection so I can get a list of project names. So is there a way to add a collection API that's an entirely different collection? Something I can use instead of tags in other words

• Not what I want, but I should probably do this https://www.Eleventy.dev/docs/quicktips/tag-pages/

• This will be good to have on the bottom of these posts - https://www.Eleventy.dev/docs/filters/collection-items/

Feels a little hacky, but it looks like the way to do this is to create a global object and filter the output I want into there.

There's another way I could potentially handle this, and that's by folder structure. I think it makes sense to try that first and see what we can do with it. First we'll move a post into this new folder structure to try and see if we can query the path usefuly.

I'll move my hello-day-1 post into src/posts/projects/devblog.

Now can I get a list of paths under a particular path? I'm not seeing a way actually. It seems like the sort of thing that it would make sense to be easy to do. Yet, no clear sign of how to do it.

I thought this might work, but no go:

Skip code block ▼

	eleventyConfig.addCollection('projects', function(collectionApi) {
        return collectionApi.getFilteredByGlob('src/projects/*');
    });

Ok, looks like I'm going to have to do something a little more complex.

git commit -am "First attempt at setting up projects list"