About

I'm Werner Siemens . Dad, husband, developer and self-proclaimed beer expert. I put together as a learning experiment. I wanted to push out a few small websites but didn't want the hassle of managing servers [1]. This led me to check out static site generators. I looked at a bunch of SSGs [2] and settled on Eleventy. It just made the most sense to me. YMMV.

I knew I wanted to have Bootstrap and JQuery available for my projects, so I figured I'd make a template heirarchy that included them. From there, I just kept adding more pieces that I wanted included by default. I leaned on the Eleventy docs and the starter projects by Phil Hawksworth and Zach Leatherman to learn by example [3], and was the result. Feel free to use it. Feel even more free to submit PRs to make it better.

Build Something with

A quick read of the blog articles on this site would get you up and running in the same spirit of learning by example that I employed. I'd suggest the following order:

Candy can be used to as scaffolding to help you get started with a new project. The following steps will get a local version of Eleventy + Candy installed and running.
Candy is using Yarn to manage dependencies and Gulp to manage the build process.
Candy makes it easy to create a blog. Using a combination of Nunjuck layout templates, front matter (with logical defaults) and Markdown, your...
Candy is ready out-of-the-box to create a simple portfolio of photos. Using Nunjuck layout templates and front matter (with logical defaults) in...
Candy is all set to go when creating one-off pages like About, Blog or Portfolio. The same scaffolding can be used to create any number of landing...
Candy comes with a bunch of little extras.
A copy of the Markdown-it demo page styled by Candy. What you see is what you get!

Image Credits

All Candy images are from Unsplash. Credit to the following artists: Sylvanus Urban, Joanna Kosinska, rawpixel, Patrick Fore and Analia Baggiano.


  1. Something like a WordPress install on a VPS just felt too much like work. ↩︎

  2. I fooled around into Gatsby, Nextein, Lektor, Hugo, JBake, and Zola (né Gutenberg). ↩︎

  3. Many, many thanks gentlemen. Appreciation sets in. ↩︎


  1. Something like a WordPress install on a VPS just felt too much like work. ↩︎

  2. I fooled around into Gatsby, Nextein, Lektor, Hugo, JBake, and Zola (né Gutenberg). ↩︎

  3. Many, many thanks gentlemen. Appreciation sets in. ↩︎