Rewritten in Zola

You're reading my personal website, which now runs on Zola. If you don't know Zola, it is a static site generator written in Rust.

Before this, my site was built with Astro, then Hugo, then plain HTML and CSS, then Eleventy. I finally landed on Zola because it feels like a good middle ground.

What makes Zola better for me? It is simple. I am not saying the others are complex. For what I want, Zola just feels simpler.

You might wonder what Zola gives me that Eleventy did not, since Eleventy is also simple. That is fair. Eleventy felt a bit too minimal for me. A few things I expected were not built in, so I had to pull them from the ecosystem. That is fine, but it is not what I want to do for this site. Also, I am not a big fan of JavaScript, which is also why I moved away from Astro even though it is genuinely good.

I used Hugo for quite some time. It works and I had no real issues with it. It just felt like too much for what I want here. I like to keep things tidy, and the default structure felt intimidating. I could have deleted what I did not need, but instead I started looking for alternatives. That is how I found Zola.

I am not rewriting everything in Rust. I tried Zola because it looked straightforward, and I stayed because I liked it. The templates use Tera, which feels like Jinja, something I already knew. The flow is the same as other generators. I write in Markdown and Zola builds the HTML. What I like is that a few useful things are already built in, like Sass support, syntax highlighting, and shortcodes, so I did not have to set much up.

This post was inspired by Matt Lugg's site and his post on switching to Zine.