robertgabriel.ninja

The personal site of Robert James Gabriel — Irish software engineer and founder of Helperbird. Bio, blog, work history, awards, and a few experiments.

Built as a static site with Eleventy, Tailwind CSS v4, and DaisyUI. It works offline (service worker) and ships almost no JavaScript.

Develop

npm install      # install dependencies
npm start        # Eleventy dev server with live reload → http://localhost:8080
npm run dev       # rebuild the JS bundle (webpack) then serve
npm run build    # production build → ./docs
npm run format   # Prettier

How it fits together

• Pages live in src/pages/ (.liquid, .md, .html). Markdown is mapped to Tailwind classes in .eleventy.js.
• Layouts & partials are in src/_includes/templates/ — base.html and blog.html both pull in the shared head.html (all SEO/meta/Open Graph live there, so edit it once).
• Theme is defined in src/assets/css/styles.css (the custom DaisyUI "irish" theme). Eleventy compiles it to docs/assets/css/engine.css at build time.
• JavaScript is a single tiny entry point, src/assets/js/index.js, bundled by webpack to docs/assets/js/main.bundle.js. It only registers the service worker.
• Offline: src/service-worker.js precaches an app shell and serves same-origin requests stale-while-revalidate, with /offline/ as a fallback.

Content

Add a blog post

Create src/pages/blog/<slug>.md:

---
layout: templates/blog.html
title: Post Title
cardTitle: Post Title
description: One-sentence summary (used for SEO and social cards).
keywords: comma, separated, keywords
url: blog/<slug>/
tags: blog
date: 2026-01-15          # ISO date — powers sitemap + article schema
dated: January 15 2026    # human-friendly date shown on the page
img: /assets/images/blog/<slug>.png   # social/OG image
---

Content here…

Add a page

Create a .liquid / .html file in src/pages/ with front matter: layout: templates/base.html, title, description, keywords.

Social cards use each page's img if set, otherwise a sensible default — no build step or image generation required.

Deploy

Pushing to main triggers .github/workflows/webpack.yml, which runs npm run build and publishes docs/ to the gh-pages branch. The custom domain is set via src/CNAME.