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2026-07-01

🔗 A Self-maintaining filesystem for static blogs

I've just finished revamping the folder structure of this blog's content to include the date in the file name as in yyyy-mm-dd-post-title.md

This finally made opening the posts folder manageable as scanning the ever-growing list of titles, was causing me to dreading opening it at all.

Recently, my guiding principle has been to remove any friction from the projects I would like to work on more.

# The file structure

The typical Eleventy setup has a flat-files setup.

    blog
    ├── post-title.md
  	└── another-post-title.md

But in my quest for documenting and portability, I ended up setting up this folder structure instead.

    blog
    └── yyyy-mm-dd-post-title
      	├── yyyy-mm-dd-post-title.md
      	└── image.png

This has a few advantages:

  • Co-location of a post's assets, images, snippets, etc.
  • Holding meta information such as title and date in the file name itself, rather than a generic index.md
  • Relative links in markdown easily map to their html links counterpart, once the site it's built.

# Automating the boring parts

Enter Claude Code, and adapting 11ty Buildawesome to my needs is just a matter of asking AI to write some scripts that integrate with the internal 11ty Dev Server watcher.

  1. Updating either the Frontmatter property date or title now triggers a name change of both the file name and the folder name.

  2. If the folder and filename change affected a live post, eg. with the Frontmatter property draft: false, a script will update all internal links that reference the updated path, and create a redirect, by adding an entry to redirects.json

[
  {
    "from": "/posts/2023-02-21-how-build-minimalist-markdown-blog-eleventy/",
    "to": "/posts/2023-02-21-build-minimalist-markdown-blog-eleventy/"
  }
]

  1. If I upload an image file into a post folder, it will automatically compress it to a sensible size. No need to worry anymore about git-tracking 5MB pictures straight out of my camera roll.

  2. A simple npm run new post title command, creates an empty document with the yyyy-mm-dd-post-title.md title slug, folder, today's date, set to draft and a scaffolded empty post.

---
date: 2026-07-01
title: "Post title"
project:
repository:
tags: []
selected: false
draft: true
description: ""
url:
---

2026-07-01

# Post title

### Resources

# Resources