Not a guide, not a review, just some observations.

Static Site Generators

There are many static site generators. I have chosen zola.

Mainly because it is written in Rust, and I am trying to learn this language. It is fairly simple to operate. At least it should be. It seems to be extensible and already has an impressive collection of themes.

My experience with Zola

To be clear, I am completely new to SSGs and blogging.

I have created some web applications with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS in the past.

I have created some with React, Dioxus, Leptos more recently.

But over all I'm little rusty in HTML and CSS. And completely out of the loop when it comes to the modern frontend ecosystem, tooling, etc. Also I think this last statement holds true if you decide to take a vacation or a healthy nap.

So maybe my experience is not really representative and some hiccups, that I may or may not experience, are products of my own creation.

But, overall, it was fairly easy to wrap my head around.

The documentation is not bad, although I can't say that it was perfect, but nevertheless it was functional, which is absolutely fine and really is all I wish for.

Two hours into the rabbit hole of the blogging adventures and behold! I have my ugly minimal, almost negligible, blog served locally.

Another hour to skim the docs to understand some fundamentals and concepts.

And boy oh boy those dangerous waters - I'm feeling confident. Common mistake from a common man.

Anyway, any sentient being ever created knows the next logical move. It's clear, obvious and alluring - read the documentation, try out features and apply them to solve problems that can be encounter, put it to practice and develop intuition. Right?

Well, being as far from the title of sentient being as a perfectly still brick from a marathon runner, I have a different thought in my mind... Theming, of course. Yeah, shockingly, I have some flaws.

Zola themes

There are many themes created or ported for use in zola - Zola themes showcase. Many more I'm sure can be found in the wild.

For my blog I have landed on this one. Terminimal. Don't forget to give a star to this and original repos. Play nice.

I am big on terminal, cli applications. This theme gives me some TUI app vibes. Anyway it is all subjective.

Monkey see, monkey like, monkey steal - with acknowledgment, of course (monkey is a gentlemen).

Monkey does what is written in the instruction banana peel and... nothing works.

I ended up just reworking my blog with the new rules in mind, for some reason I failed to use it as a theme per se. Maybe it is a me problem, maybe something missing from the docs, maybe something missing in theme instructions. At this point it doesn't really matter. It worked out.

Closing words

In half a day I have worked out some simple but functional setup for my blog. I can piece together some md files and call it a day.

I think I will stick with Zola and explore its features.

Overall, I had fun, learned something new and made progress towards my goal.

I would like to express my gratitude to the maintainers and contributors to Zola project. Maybe I could contribute in the future myself.

In the next article I would like to write about the process, and my experience, of deployment of my newborn baby blog to the web. That was an interesting experience.