This website is now using Zola

After writing the last blog post it became obvious to me that migrating to a proper static site generator with templates and all the fancy stuff is necessary, so that's what I've been working on for the past few days.

Historically this website has always been just raw HTML with a bunch of CSS thrown at it. That had it's benefits like me being able to just tinker with everything and maintain a sense of absolute minimalism (which to be honest was completely fine back when it used to be just a front page), but as the site grew a bit, it became a massive chore and a pain in the ass every time I wanted to change or add anything.

So anyways, my choice was mostly limited to Hugo (written in Go) and Zola (written in Rust). Ultimately I decided to give Zola a go and stuck with that choice.

I still decided to not use any of the publicly available templates and just re-created the whole layout of my original page with some changes, because why not.

In this post I will yap a little bit about my experience with this transition, what improvements happened, what it means for this blog and which things annoyed me in the process. Enjoy.

Changes

For the starters, while migrating to Zola i decided to make some changes to the website. Some content got dropped. It may come back at some point in a slightly different form but my photography showcase and a somewhat already outdated "my hardware" pages are gone. This is not an accident.

Also, the about me page has been refreshed. Go give a look if you want.

Lastly, the theme while mostly unmodified (not without trying, I wanted to give the color scheme a refresh but hit a creative wall) has some more-or-less minor changes too. Honestly I like it better now :3

Benefits for me and (maybe) for you

So, why do I even bothered so much?

Well, mainly because I wanted to write more blogs for a while and one of the things stopping me (besides ADHD) has been the painstaking process of manually working with HTML to post anything and then very carefully verifying that everything works.

In a sense, every blog post means writing a website from the scratch 🥴

Now I can work with a regular markdown to write content which is way faster and less annoying, so you can (maybe! pls don't hold me liable here!) expect more posts coming in the foreseeable future.

In addition to that the Atom/RSS feed is now automatically generated, so the chance of me forgetting to update it when I publish new content drastically drops ^^

Also finally I decided to publish the source code of this site publicly now that it's a bit less of a hot mess – it's available here on the Forgejo instance hosted by my partner :3

Why the switch was a little annoying

Some things with getting into static site generators with their own templating engines are a bit annoying. Honestly what made me struggle a lot here especially at the very beginning was the documentation.

I'm mostly mentioning it here at all to remind those of you reading this about something I find very important while writing good docs.

Please, for the love of gods, make sure you don't write it for yourself, actually

Zola's documentation in many aspects strikes me as a text written by the developers for themselves, without even realizing that. It makes a lot of assumptions about the knowledge of the reader that for many (most?) of them won't be true.

It's very hard to find basic information about the syntax of templating language and how different elements of the site interact with each other, and those bits that mention it are very technical in a way that might be difficult to understand for many people.

Summary

So yeah to end this too-long-for-its-own-good blog, I had fun. And now my site is better and easier to deploy new content. I will probably make some updates to it and improve it further soon, but for now I'm satisfied enough to show it to the world.

Cya!