GoKawiilUPDATE: The Kickstarter has been cancelled and rescheduled for a few months from now due to emails not being sent, ruining the project's "momentum" despite reaching their goal in a single day.
Yesterday, the Font Awesome team launched a Kickstarter for a new project called Build Awesome and Build Awesome Pro, looking to raise $40,000 USD. And it has already reached that funding goal.
What is Build Awesome? Simply put, it's a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy. Or rather, it is the end of Eleventy.
I have personal stakes in this. 11ty is what my site, and thousands of others, are built and powered with. I support 11ty on Open Collective and have created themes for the framework. So how do I feel about this?
But before I get into why I (and many other 11ty devs) are not celebrating this hugely successful Kickstarter, let's first answer the question: What the hell is 11ty? Well, it's a static site generator.
Okay, but what the hell is a static site generator, and why does it matter for the literal future of the Internet so much? I'm so glad you asked.
Part One: A Brief History of the Non-Dynamic
Static websites predate dynamic content management systems with their fancy backends and databases. In the early days of the Internet, all websites were mere collections of static HTML files.
Dynamic sites started with the advent of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and later server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP, and Ruby on Rails, along with database-driven CMS frameworks such as WordPress, which powers roughly 43% of the entire Internet.
Thankfully, the pendulum began to swing back towards static approaches with the rise of modern static-site generators. More secure, simpler hosting, and so much faster. Essentially, all you need to do is build a folder with some template languages and Markdown files and you end up with a fully-rendered website. Here's the timeline:
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