Learn 11ty, Algolia and Clojurescript

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Eleventy, or 11ty,  is a simple yet very powerful static site generator. It does not require any config to get started.

This what it will take you to get an 11ty project running.

```
npm install -g @11ty/eleventy
echo '# Page header' > README.md
eleventy
```

After watching this collection you will be able to:

* Bootstrap a simple 11ty website
* Use 11ty layouts
* Chaining multiple 11ty layouts
* Use 11ty Collections
* Create pages from data

...and much more

Eleventy was created to be a JavaScript alternative to Jekyll. It’s zero-config by default but has flexible configuration options. Eleventy works with your project’s existing directory structure.

Eleventy uses independent template engines. We don’t want to hold your content hostage. If you decide to use something else later, having your content decoupled in this way will make migration easier.

11ty

Getting Started with Eleventy

Start from a blank project and build up to an Eleventy site that includes a blog collection and is prepared to source content from a headless CMS. You'll also learn how to add Sass as the styling solution, complete with triggering 11ty to re-compile when the Sass changes.

These lessons will help explain key 11ty features and concepts to help you make the most of this amazing static site generator.

By the last lesson, you'll have learned how to:
- define custom `input` and `output` directories
- create a layout that accesses front matter variables
- watch for Sass changes and include CSS in the build proces
- create an 11ty collection using `tags`
- define front matter for an entire collection
- make and apply a filter to a collection
- generate pages from an external data source, such as a CMS or API

Build An Eleventy (11ty) Site From Scratch

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

ClojureScript is a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript. It emits JavaScript code which is compatible with the advanced compilation mode of the Google Closure optimizing compiler.

clojurescript

In this lesson I show you how to get and manipulate command-line arguments in Clojure/ClojureScript by writing a small program that greets you by name. I also show how comments are delimited, how to get a value out of a sequence, how to bind a symbol to a value, and how to define a function.

Handle command-line arguments in ClojureScript


Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic – every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

clojure

In this lesson I show what a Clojure keyword is and why we prefer them as keys in maps; and the three ways we can look up a value in a map.

Keywords and Map Lookup in Clojure and ClojureScript

In this video, you will learn to bootstrap an eleventy project.

we'll start from an empty directory, initialize it as an npm package, install `@11ty/eleventy` package and create the website entry point.

Eleventy can compile multiple file formats, HTML, markdown, liquid, and njk.

Check out the eleventy [docs](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/) for more information.

Bootstrap an eleventy project

In this video, you will learn how to use the eleventy layouts feature.
Eleventy Layouts are special templates that can be used to wrap other content.


for more information check the layouts [docs](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/layouts/)

Use eleventy layouts

In this video, you will learn how to use layout chaining with eleventy.
Layouts in eleventy can use other layouts. You can also use a different template engine across layouts. This is very handy if we want to wrap some pages with extra markup but not all the pages.


for more information check out the eleventy [docs](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/layout-chaining/)

Use Layout Chaining in eleventy

In this video, you will learn how to create pages from data in eleventy. a data source can be a JSON file or a js file.

for more information check out the eleventy [docs](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/pages-from-data/)

Create pages from data in eleventy

In this video, you will learn how to use the collection feature in eleventy.
Collections will allow to group content under one tag and loop through it in your template files

for more information check out the eleventy [docs](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/collections/)

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