alterae.srht.site

this website itself! | back

this is my first real attempt at making a website for myself. i always planned on using SvelteKit or something for it, but instead it's an entirely static site built using Zola.

thoughts

zola is pretty great. i've set up a really scuffed workflow using make to serve and publish the site. i guess technically that means the site can't be built on windows but wsl makes that largely a non-issue.

i'm pleased with how it's turned out so far, though. got a really simple responsive stylesheet (only like three rules) that looks good on basically anything. it should even look nice in lynx!

a marked plus of Zola is that i do not have to write any javascript, or interact with the NPM ecosystem at all, since it's written in Rust and brings its own Sass compilation.

the simplicity of the whole setup also makes it really versatile, development-wise. i'm writing this post on my phoe, using Emacs over ssh. Emacs isn't really my favorite tool, but it handles line wrapping on narrow screens better than vim does.

i'm also hosting the site on Sourcehut Pages instead of github pages. in general i think i'm mostly switching over to sourcehut. it's nice, it's simpler than github, and the business model is less creepy.

it's also actually somehow easier to setup than github pages. i can manually add updating the site on push, but the process isn't special and i can also do it myself from any repository - or from none at all. as long as i can turn the website into a tarball, i can upload it via curl. it's a surprisingly present workflow, especially now that i've automated it a bit.

the automation in question is pretty scuffed - i'm using a custom Makefile to automate building, serving, and uploading. it's not stringly necessary but it saves me a little bit of typing. a make clean and a make upload and the site is updated.

all in all, it's more ergonomic than i expected, and i think i'll be sticking with this workflow for a while.

future plans

add more content, and continue to flesh out the aesthetics and usability of the site.