Motivation

The blog has been migrated from Jekyll to Zola for fun and profit.

  • Setting up Jekyll was surprisingly fiddly on Windows - I had to install ruby & msys, then troubleshoot live reloading. On the other hand, Zola is a single executable that just works
  • My next job is going to involve a lot of Rust - I thought I'd get used to things like TOML!
  • It's something new and hence - wonderful††There is a book by Soviet-era poet Daniil Kharms titled 'Я думал о том, как прекрасно всё первое!' - 'I thought about how wonderful is everything [first/new]!'

Migration

After creating a brand new site with zola init myblog, I have added Slim theme as a git submodule, copied over my posts, converted variables from YAML to TOML and... that's mostly it.

Automatic deployment

I make use of Github Actions just like in the docs, except that checkout needs submodules: true due to how the theme is added as a git submodule.

Blog structure

Grouping posts by year and making each year section transparent so that everything is aggregated in the parent blog section is super neat! The only problem I had was with javascript playthings page. To make it not appear in the list of regular posts, I had to add sort_by = "date" to the root _index.md, then delete the date field from the javascript index.md. Oh, well!

Content folder structure

Marginal notes

Lifted pretty much verbatim from here. I love them!

Theme tweaks

  • Mobile-friendly list of posts - I have discovered it doesn't look so good with long titles/many tags by default
  • Modified template for post header to allow null date in pages
  • Removed circles under emphasized text

The second one was the most cumbersome, as I had to modify a macro that is responsible for post headers. It was done in 2 steps:

  1. First, create templates/custom_macros.html with a modified version of post_header macro from themes/slim/templates/macros.html
  2. Second, create templates/page.html that extends themes/slim/templates/page.html, to import custom_macros.html and use its version of the post_header inside {% block content %}

The rest was just copying slim.css from themes/slim/sass/ to sass/ and changing what I needed.

What's next?

I have been toying with an idea of adding a comment section. Something suitable for a static website while being less intrusive than Disqus. Perhaps Isso? Seems like fiddling with a blog is at least as fun as writing it.