This site would not have been possible without the help of many open source tools and services. I’m grateful to all those who have contributed to these projects and made them available for others to use.
It uses a JAMstack architecture. It is built using Eleventy and lives on the Netlify platform. It is delivered over HTTPS thanks to a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt, automatically provisioned by Netlify. Before July 2023 it instead used a self-hosted WordPress instance, which is still live at lea0.verou.me. You can read about the migration here.
Other tools used include:
- Bootstrap Icons for icons
- The typography uses variable fonts exclusively:
- Inter for headings and certain small text, which was something I brought over from the WP site. It’s a beautiful sans-serif typeface by Rasmus Andersson, and has become my new favorite font, displacing my previous favorite for over a decade, Helvetica Neue.
- Vollkorn for body text, a beautiful serif Typeface by Friedrich Althausen.
- Inconsolata for code, a monospace font by Raph Levien.
- PostCSS with the Nesting Plugin to use CSS Nesting before it’s widely available in browsers (though we’re getting there!)
- reading-time to calculate the reading time of each post
- eleventy-plugin-embed-everything to embed content from other sites
- eleventy-plugin-toc to generate a table of contents for each post
- markdown-it-anchor to automatically add anchors to headings
- markdown-it-attrs to add attributes to markdown elements
- plur to pluralize words
- concurrently to run multiple npm scripts concurrently
I can easily see this list getting out of date, so you may want to check out the package.json file for a more up-to-date list of dependencies.
Licensing
The source code is available on GitHub. Feel free to look at over and borrow any techniques or code you like.
- The site content (
*.mdfiles and images in/blog/) is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. - The code (
*.js,*.cjs,*.njk,*.cssfiles) is published under an MIT licence. - The design (logo, visual style etc) is © Lea Verou and may not be used without permission.
- Obviously, any code or assets not created by me are subject to their own license.
For more details and rationale, see this post.