b.polente.de

The source of b.polente.de — "Cases by Holger Hellinger", a blog built with the Eleventy site generator (currently v3).

Originally derived from eleventy-base-blog, but it has grown its own image pipeline, tag handling, search, and diagram rendering.

Requirements

• Node.js 22 or newer (see .nvmrc — nvm use picks it up)
• Chromium for Playwright, used to render Mermaid diagrams at build time: npx playwright install --with-deps chromium

Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/polent/b.git
cd b
npm install

npm install runs patch-package afterwards, which applies patches/ to markdown-it-mermaid-server.

Run a local development server on http://localhost:8080/:

npm start

Build the production site into _site/ (clean, Eleventy build, then the Pagefind search index):

npm run build

Building with plain npx @11ty/eleventy works, but skips the Pagefind step, so /search/ will not find anything.

Other scripts:

Script	What it does
npm run clean	Remove _site/
npm run debug	Build with DEBUG=Eleventy*
npm run debugstart	Dev server with DEBUG=Eleventy*
npm run benchmark	Build with Eleventy's benchmark output
npm run build-ghpages	Build with a /eleventy-base-blog/ path prefix

Layout of the repository

Path	Contents
content/	Eleventy input directory — pages, blog/, feeds, sitemap
_includes/	Nunjucks layouts and partials
_data/metadata.js	Site title, URL, description, author
public/	Copied to the site root as-is (CSS, favicons, robots.txt)
eleventy.config.js	Plugins, filters, collections, Markdown setup
eleventy.config.images.js	The {% image %} shortcode
eleventy.config.drafts.js	Draft handling
_site/	Build output (git-ignored)

Writing a post

Each post is its own folder under content/blog/, holding the Markdown file plus the images it uses, so the {% image %} shortcode can reference them relatively:

content/blog/MyNewPost/
  MyNewPost.md
  screenshot.png

Front matter needs title, description, date, and tags; content/blog/blog.11tydata.js supplies the layout and the posts tag.

---
title: My New Post
description: One sentence for listings, the feed, and search results.
date: 2026-01-31
tags:
  - Engineering
  - AI
---

Notes on authoring:

• Drafts. draft: true keeps a post out of production builds; it is still rendered by npm start and --watch.
• Tags are grouped by slug, so Engineering and engineering share one tag page; the most-used spelling becomes the canonical one.
• Mermaid fenced code blocks are rendered to SVG at build time (hence Playwright), with intermediate files landing in the git-ignored mermaidTmp/.
• Footnotes ([^1]) and heading anchors are enabled, and post layouts build an "On this page" list from the h2 headings.
• Media — .mp3, .mp4, and .wav files under content/ are copied to /media.

Deployment

.github/workflows/main.yml runs on every push to main: it installs dependencies and Chromium, runs npm run build, and uploads _site/ to the web host over SFTP using the FTP_* repository secrets.

License

MIT