Beginner’s luck #5: suspended starters

It’s not only all good things that come to an end; the not-so-good ones usually do, too.

As I’ve chronicled here a few times over the last year-plus . . .

• “Beginner’s luck”
• “Beginner’s luck: an update”
• “Beginner’s luck #3: adding a Zola starter”
• “Beginner’s luck #4: the Vite edition”

. . . I have churned out a few starter sets for the Eleventy, Hugo, and Zola static site generators (SSGs). However, I’ve decided to suspend development on each set, as of today. The GitHub repository for each set now has a note to that effect.

Update, 2021-11-02: I decided to go back today and do one more fix on the hugo_twcss Hugo/Tailwind CSS starter set, based on the configuration I described in “Making Tailwind JIT work with Hugo.”

As for why I’m pulling the plug on working with these, call it an after-effect of my retirement combined with my original intent, which was to keep these updated constantly. That also means all their software dependencies, especially in the cases of the Eleventy starters. To handle these repos in what I consider the right way for actively developed projects, I’d need to do quite a bit of work on them in the near future, and with no end in sight. I had wanted to keep them active and fresh, but that was becoming more of a chore than I wanted.¹ So, rather than leave them half-maintained, I chose instead just to mark them as “suspended” as a sort of caveat emptor.

I’ll keep the starters’ repos alive for the time being, in case anybody is curious about the code for some bizarre reason, but in any event there are (and always have been) much better places to look:

• Eleventy — “Starter Projects” page.
• Hugo — “Starter Kits” page and “Themes” mini-site.
• Zola — “Themes” page.

To all who’ve already forked the starters for your own experimentation and use, thanks for giving them your time and attention. I hope they helped.