General
Today I switched the blogs page from Hugo to Zola.
While Hugo was a great experience, I always thought that it might be very over the top of what I want to do. This is not some kind of simple content management system for me, but I also plan to fiddle around a little bit with the static site internet, especially HTML and CSS.
So the benefits to Hugo I see are:
- Due to my job I'm familiar with the great Tera templating engine.
- Zola is written in Rust 🦀! It's probably not that I would ever need to make changes, but if so, it would be much easier for me to contribute.
- Simplicity. Hugo is great. But hugo is also just large. Zend isn't.
ToDo
This is a living document, so you can read my todo list here:
- About Page
- Blog Pages
- GitLab Integration (yes, this page is hosted on GitLab Pages)
- Taxonomies
- Top Navigation
- Basic CSS
- RSS feeds
- Extra: Dark mode (this was much easier than I thought!)
Summary
A few hours later and I'm done. It's basically crazy how few steps I needed to move my personal homepage from Hugo to Zola. The basic steps I took today:
- Save
content/folder, delete all hugo files. - Install and init a
zolaproject. - Realize that basically everything except
tagswork. Great 😮!- this might be due to the fact that I used basically no hugo features. If you have bigger and more extensive sites, this might be much more difficult for you!
- try out some templates and realize I don't like them.
- Read the great documentation about templates.
- spend a few hours writing a basic setup
What should I say? I'm pretty happy. While I was developing the template, I tried to read a lot about how to write a simplistic website and ended up with a great website about brutalist web design. While I did not implement all points yet, I like how fast you can go forward if you apply simple principles and keep the complexity of your projects small.