Greetings, programs. I’m taking a break from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (and being lazy in general) and thought I’d write up my links post. Yesterday was the 15th birthday of one of my kids and later today we get to celebrate with her friends. Outside of that and laundry, I’ve got a large amount of nothing to get accomplished today and I absolutely love it. Let’s get to the links. As always, I hope you find these worth your time!

Eleventy’s Future

As you know (or hopefully know), my blog here is built on Eleventy, a Node.js static site generator. I’ve been using it, and blogging about it for almost six years. This past week, Zach announced that Eleventy is becoming "Build Awesome" – you can read the announcement post here: Eleventy is now Build Awesome. For folks who may not know, this is part of the same group that owns Font Awesome and Web Awesome, the new name for Shoelace.

As you can imagine, this has caused quite a bit of … concern amongst the Eleventy community. As an example:

• The End of Eleventy
• Au revoir, Eleventy
• Eleventy is changing its name, among other things, and I don’t love it

Also, and to be clear, this is not related, Sia announced the end of the Eleventy Meetup after five years and thirty episodes.

I’m not stressing over this now. I don’t like the name, but honestly that doesn’t bother me, I’ll just keep saying Eleventy. I can appreciate the goal here – provide more while also earning money – but I do worry about the community, usage, and so forth. That being said, Zach’s been a great caretaker and devoted a hell of a lot of energy to something most people don’t pay a dime for. All I can do now is hope for the best.

Swatchify

A few days ago, I blogged about the latest update to Color Thief, a JavaScript library for getting prominent colors in images. There’s another option as well, the nicely named Swatchify. This is also a JavaScript library, but can also be used as a API service as well. (To be clear, if you host it.) There’s also a Go library and CLI.

Oh, and this has nothing to do with the very cool watch company…

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CodePen 2.0

I don’t usually cover "product launches" (although I guess I just did re: Build Awesome), but one of my favorite online tools, CodePen just released (in beta!) a 2.0 version. You can learn more here: CodePen 2.0 Beta

This is a big change, and I strongly encourage you to pay attention to the onboarding notes if you give it a try. There is a lot of really good stuff here, including a proper file system, build processes, and more, but you will want to pay attention as the editor walks you through the changes.

Cassidy has a great demo in the video below:

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If you watched it, you’ll note the gets tripped up by one of the main changes – your CSS and JavaScript aren’t automatically included anymore. They can be! But as she discovered, you need to do set things up right if you wan the "auto" behavior.

I’ve only played with it a bit, but I really like what I see so far.

Just For Fun

I’ve shared videos from Matt One before – he creates incredible mashups and remixes. I just wish he’d skip the incredibly cringe worthy AI videos. That being said, I subscribe to him for his tunes, not his videos. The track below is a remix of The Cure’s "Letter To Elise", and it’s a dramatic mix of the original, really changing the tone/mood in an interesting way:

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Raymond Camden