Hello, it's a plain markdown changelog

This is a plain markdown post. Also serves as an informal changelog for this project:

• First step was installing eleventy via npm and following this minimal tutorial. At this point I created a minimal layout.liquid file, some .md files in a posts folder, and index.html file in the root folder to create the index page, and a posts.json file in the posts folder to ensure that everything in the posts folder is automatically given a "posts" tag
• Second step was installing the eleventy syntax highlighting plugin and adding it to the .eleventy.js configuration file in the project root folder. To get it working you also need to modify the template in the layout.liquid file so that it loads the PrismJS syntax highlighting JS from your favourite CDN. Once that was complete, code blocks show syntax highlighting but of course they do not execute.
• Third step was to test the basic idea for knitr integration. I created a post with the .kmd file extension, in which the R code chunks are written using knitr syntax. Eleventy ignores this file, but I can call knitr::knit() to create a knitted markdown file with the .md file extension. Eleventy picks up this .md file and creates the corresponding .html for the blog
• Fourth step was remembering that I should probably have this in a git repo... so yeah. Added the _site folder to .gitignore for now. I also wanted a README.md file for github that isn't part of the blog, so now I need to add an .eleventyignore file (see here) too so that eleventy doesn't try to include the readme in the static site
• Fifth step was to add some nice css styling. I could write my own but why? Instead I chose to use skeleton for lightweight css templating. There's a few ways for eleventy to handle static assets: I took the easiest path and added a passthrough to my .eleventy.js file
• Sixth step was to set it up to deploy to github pages. The output directory needs to go to docs rather than _site, and we need to ensure that eleventy ignores the docs folder. Also need .nojekyll and CNAME files with a passthrough so it ends up in the docs folder, and setup the CNAME resource record for the subdomain knitr-11ty.djnavarro.net so that it deploys correctly. In this instance I'm deploying to the root of a subdomain so I don't have to bother with this but if you're deploying to a subdirectory you need to set a path prefix
• Seventh step was to rejig the blog so that each post is a subfolder rather than a single file. The blog I set up from the tutorial uses a single file per post, and eleventy writes posts/my-blog-post.md to _site/posts/my-blog-post/index.html (or in this case docs not _site). That's convenient if the whole blog post is just a single markdown file but it won't work in the knitr context because we need the .kmd file (knitr markdown), the rendered .md file, and any images knitr creates to be grouped together. For the images in particular it's important that we preserve the directory structure or else everything breaks. Fortunately this is easy: you just create the desired folder structure and rename the files to "index". So now I have posts/my-blog-post/index.md as the markdown, and eleventy will also write that to _site/posts/my-blog-post/index.html.
• Eighth step was to make sure that we have a passthrough rule that ensures that the knitr-generated png files are copied to the output, so we now update the .eleventy.js file to create a rule for png files
• Ninth step was to write a simple render.sh shell script that calls knitr::knit() to render a post from .kmd to .md. After a little bit of thought I decided that since (a) eleventy is very fast at rebuilding the website and (b) I've had bad experiences with tools that "automatically" decide when to re-render a source document, it makes sense not to automate the knit process for this toy project
• Tenth step was to edit the template to allow (minimal) support of social media tags
• Eleventh step was to add mathjax support
• Twelfth step was to add tweaks.css to override skeleton defaults I didn't want