Part 20: Working with Shortcodes and Collections

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?

• Order projects listing by last posted blog in that project

• Limit the output of home page post lists to a specific number of posts

• Show the latest post below the site intro on the homepage.

• Tags pages with Pagination

• Posts should be able to support a preview header image that can also be shown on post lists.

• Create a Markdown-It plugin that reads the project's repo URL off the folder data file and renders commit messages with links to the referenced commit. (Is this even possible?) (Is there a way to do it with eleventy instead?)

Day 20

Ok, well, first problem was I hadn't switched the variable. Doing that got the reverse working. Let's try removing the array clone.

Hmm. Interesting, doing that appears to keep the tag pages reversed, but the homepage post list from the projectList shortcode is broken again.

I checked this issue first and it looks this was reported, but not this exact context. It looks like it was an issue with getAllSorted. Ok, I'm going to suggest documentation and keep .slice in place. I could potentially use the reverse filter, but I'm not sure that would work well with the functionality I'm trying to create, which gives me the ability to generate and alter these lists using arguments from the Markdown front-matter. It would be good to warn that collections manipulated in shortcodes impact other uses of the same collections.

Got a late start so, short day today.

git commit -am "Solve issue with shortcodes mutating collections"