Issue
39

Issue 39 - Another canary, Netlify redirects in your front matter, a speedlify question, just an index.md...

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Highlights

There's a new canary among us. Eleventy canary v3.0.0-alpha.6 was released last week. It incorporates the Virtual Templates that I mentioned last week. And there's an update to how directory references work in the context of Virtual Templates. If you have not yet tested your site with the canary releases of 3.0, here's how you can.

Define Netlify redirect rules in your templates' front matter. Using the new Virtual Templates in 3.0.0-alpha.6, Aleksandr Hovhannisyan created eleventy-plugin-netlify-redirects to do just that. In the README, he notes his motivation: "You can define Netlify redirect rules by hand, but this requires keeping the new/current URL up to date and in sync with your template files' slugs/permalinks. If you change a template file name multiple times, that becomes a headache to manage. This plugin allows you to define your redirect rules right inside your templates' front matter; the new/current URL is always page.url." I expect that there will be more interesting use cases for this new capability.

Speedlify and the Leaderboards. A comment came up on the Discord server recently noting that there had been no mention of how often the Eleventy Leaderboards are updated. I have no specific facts, but from what I've heard, I believe that they get updated every few months, perhaps once per quarter. Did you know that you can run your own instance of speedlify to run these tests on your own set of websites?

Start an Eleventy site with just index.md. As Juha-Matti Santala so eloquently put it "index.md is a valid Eleventy project." In this brief post, he highlights how, with Eleventy, "You can start so simple and keep enhancing it. You can pick the parts you want to bring in and skip the ones you donโ€™t like or need." This tracks with the Quick Start in 2 Steps that Zach shows on the Eleventy home page. index.md for the win!

Register for 11ty conference. Once again, there's still time to register for the 11ty conference, a free, single-day, single-track, and completely virtual conference scheduled for May 9th.

Until next time...