Zola migration
Migration to Zola
Several years ago I created my last page by generating all of the HTML myself. This proved to be an educational experience and that is just how things were done. The last redesign I am guessing sometime in 2014 range by the dates on some of the files I migrated to use bootstrap but again hand wrote the HTML.
Writing the HTML by handle seemed less interesting as I have gotten older and my interested shifted. I started to focus on this being an way to communicate to other people instead of technical learning. So I started down a path of how can I do this easily and quickly?
My requirements
This process made me think about what am I trying to accomplish? Well I wanted something simple that I could easily update without having to really dig into the weeds. Using some kind of markup language such as Markdown as I am familiar with it.
I also realized I didn't want to have to setup and maintain a lot of products for this to work. I didn't need any forums or really anyway to collect any data. So this lead me to a simple static page generator.
I looked at 2 different ones out there Hugo and Zola. Both seemed to do what I wanted. They are both highly configurable and have themes which saves me time as I don't have to build much. I went with Zola as it is more of a single application which was really simple to install.
This was an easy install using macports to install zola. Now what do we do? Well spend again WAY to much time looking at possible themes that are out there. I decided on the zolastrap theme which provides me a highly configurable bootstrap experience that meets my taste in style.
Transition
I have backed up my old static pages and replaced them with what was produced by zola to give it a go.
I imagine there will be tweaks coming and that is part of the learning process.
I hope you enjoyed the first part of the journey and I look forward to sharing more stuff I am playing with.