October 7, 2025

Project Spark: A Deep Dive into This Eleventy Blog

By Infinity Spark 4 min read

Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at the Spark blog project. This post serves as a summary of the architecture, technologies, and features that power this site. Whether you're a developer looking for inspiration or just curious about how it works, here's a breakdown of what makes Spark tick.

The Technology Stack

At its core, Spark is a modern static site built with a focus on performance, developer experience, and clean aesthetics. The key technologies used are:

  • Eleventy (11ty): A flexible and powerful static site generator that transforms our Markdown content and Nunjucks templates into a fast, pre-rendered website.
  • Tailwind CSS v4: A utility-first CSS framework that allows for rapid UI development and a highly customizable design system without writing custom CSS.
  • Nunjucks: A rich and powerful templating language for JavaScript, used by Eleventy to create reusable layouts and components (base.njk, post.njk, etc.).
  • PostCSS: A tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript plugins. Here, it's used to process Tailwind CSS and minify the final stylesheet for production.
  • Google Generative AI: The project includes a script (generate-descriptions.js) that leverages the Google Generative AI SDK, demonstrating a modern workflow for automating content creation tasks like writing post descriptions.

Core Features

This project isn't just a simple blog; it comes with several features built-in:

  • Modern & Animated UI: The frontend is designed with a clean, "glassmorphism" aesthetic, featuring subtle animations and gradients to create a polished user experience.
  • Dynamic Blog Content: All posts are managed as simple Markdown files in the src/posts directory, making content creation straightforward. The site automatically generates post pages, lists, and an RSS feed.
  • Data-Driven Templates: The templates are designed to be dynamic, pulling information like author and reading time directly from each post's front matter.
  • Search-Ready: The project includes flexsearch, a fast client-side search library, and generates a search index. The UI for the search functionality is the next step to be implemented.
  • Embed-Friendly: Using the eleventy-plugin-embed-everything plugin, embedding content like YouTube videos is seamless.

Development Workflow

The project is set up with a simple and efficient development workflow managed by npm scripts:

  • npm run dev: Starts a local development server with hot-reloading for both Eleventy and Tailwind CSS, allowing for real-time previews of any changes.
  • npm run build: Creates a production-ready build of the site in the _site directory, with minified CSS.
  • npm run generate:descriptions: An example of a custom script to automate content tasks using AI.

What's Next?

While the foundation is solid, there are several exciting improvements planned:

  1. Full Search Implementation: Building the UI to connect with the already-generated search index.
  2. Social Sharing: Adding buttons to make it easy for readers to share posts on social media.
  3. Tag Pages: Creating dedicated pages for each tag to allow for better content discovery.
  4. Performance Optimization: Implementing automated image optimization and purging unused CSS to make the site even faster.

This project serves as a strong starting point for anyone looking to build a modern, feature-rich static blog. Thanks for reading!