Setting up my blog
Introduction
After I killed my personal website somewhere around 2023, since I never really found time to update it anymore, I have been missing a place to give as a home to my loose thoughts. Consider this blog that place and I hope I will keep writing here in the future.
Research
I took some time looking for a good solution for my new personal site, focused on blogging and ease-of-hosting. My priorities where roughly:
- Should generate a static site
- Should be easy to set up
- Should be maintained, or at least reasonably popular
- Should have a focus on blogging / personal sites
- Should have good enough themes out-of-the-box so I don't get distracted theming the site immediately
- Should have support for atom / rss feed generation from my posts
A very good site I found when searching was Jamstack and after looking through many different generators I finally landed on Zola
Setting up Zola
Getting started with Zola was both easy and a bit confusing:
- Installing and getting it running is super easy
- Theming the size is very confusing, as you don't just apply a theme, but also get new content templates you have to adhere to. At least I found it to not work with the templates from the blog example from the zola documentation
I installed the first minimal theme focused on blogging that I liked terminus
Installation
I'm sadly still on windows, but at least installing zola there is as easy as it gets using winget
winget install getzola.zola
And that's all, now we are ready to create a new site by running zola init inside of an empty folder
Choosing a theme
The official docs are a trap, since they will have you set up your own templates for blogging. This works fine as a first test, but when you then use a theme, it will not work, as those come with their own templates.
So rather choose a theme right away, install it depending to it's documentation and look how they have setup their templates.
For terminus (and I think most other themes) the best way to install is to clone a git submodule into the themes folder.
git submodule add https://github.com/ebkalderon/terminus.git themes/terminus
Next steps
Other than filling up the site with some posts, I also want to look into other things:
- Structuring blog posts into long-form projects for themes I'm interested in, or open-source code I'll be writing over long time periods
- Actually hosting the site, either on Codeberg pages, or some cheap hosting service
- Venture into self-hosting and write about that