Now blogging with Zola
Six years after hand-rolling my own layout with Jekyll, I'm now modernizing my personal blog and homepage.
I wanted to make my custom Jekyll theme prettier and more responsive, but failed at even getting it to build locally. I was never much of a Ruby connoisseur, and it's clear the setup was always a mess.
Fixing it was probably going to be too much work, and even then it'd still lack many quality-of-life features, such as tags, table of contents, checking for internal broken links, cover photos for posts, etc -- all of which I'd have to implement myself for my custom setup.
I ended up choosing Zola, and the tagline on the website perfectly summarizes the reasoning: "Forget dependencies. Everything you need in one binary." -- which was my main headache with Jekyll.
That it has a decent theme library and a good system for selectively overriding parts of a theme are excellent bonuses. So I just chose a theme and got to work.
Configuring and porting everything took some time, and there are a few concepts to internalize, but the docs and examples covered everything I needed. Setting up the deployment with GitHub Pages was also breeze.
If you're also considering the move, here's a few of the Zola features that I like:
- infer post date from file name
- rich tagging, aka taxonomies
- selectively overriding parts of a theme, so that you don't have to fork it just to make some minor tweaks
- colocating assets in a folder to keep things organized, e.g. the images in this post
- broken link checker
Hopefully the new setup motivates me to publish more often? :)
Finally, the before and after:
