Converting to Zola

Zola

I haven't had (or taken really) the time to write anything technical in the last few years. The pandemic definitely did have an impact on me, but also work. I was not in a frame of mind to program at home, much less write about it. But lately, I've felt better and I am getting back into that hobby of mine.

In the interim, the static site generator that I was using (Hugo) upgraded quite a few times, so much so that a bunch of warnings/errors came up when I tried it again to update my site. This was a reminder that I don't actually understand fully the tool I'm using and that I could probably understand better. Given that I would had to change things anyhow, I allowed myself to look at alternatives and came up on Zola. One thing that I did not like much about Hugo was the templates. It is based on the Go templating language. Zola is based on the Tera templating engine which itself is based on the popular Jinja, which I find more intuitive. So I decided to try and switch.

One thing I did not want to change was the layout of the site. I quite like the style of the Hugo theme I was using: Internet-Weblog. So I set out to replicate it, mostly, but did change a few things.

First, I abandoned microposts, since I realized I have short posts, but nothing micro. I did not use some of the features of the theme, so I did not put them in and kept the basic minimum.

Then, I have changed the RSS feed for an Atom feed. Hoping this will not be too problematic. I probably had one, maybe two subscribers, so I doubt it will affect that many people.

I also added a link footnote system so that the footnotes are clickable and there is a back link after the note to get back to the text.

I also changed the colors of the code samples and the highlighting. I use a tomorrow night like color scheme (which, incidentally, I like to use in my editors as well).

One thing I couldn't achieve is the exact same pagination. This is a technical limitation of Zola. It might change in the next versions, but for now, the about page is now considered a "post" just like the rest of the posts. If the limitation in Zola is lifted, I'll remove it. For now, I've artificially set the date of the about page to be before any other post, so that it is at the end of the pagination.

Other than those, I don't think there is much change. Still, thought I would mark the change by this short post to remember when it happened.