blog about programing and art Zola 2026-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 https://lando.codeberg.page/tags/showcase/atom.xml 2026-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 2026-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 Lando Schumpich https://lando.codeberg.page/blog/blogging-again/ <h2 id="introduction">Introduction<a class="post-anchor" href="#introduction" aria-label="Anchor link for: introduction"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <p>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.</p> <h2 id="research">Research<a class="post-anchor" href="#research" aria-label="Anchor link for: research"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <p>I took some time looking for a good solution for my new personal site, focused on <strong>blogging</strong> and <strong>ease-of-hosting</strong>. My priorities where roughly:</p> <ul> <li>Should generate a static site</li> <li>Should be easy to set up</li> <li>Should be maintained, or at least reasonably popular</li> <li>Should have a focus on blogging / personal sites</li> <li>Should have good enough themes <em>out-of-the-box</em> so I don't get distracted theming the site immediately</li> <li>Should have support for <em>atom</em> / <em>rss</em> feed generation from my posts</li> </ul> <p>A very good site I found when searching was <a href="https://jamstack.org/generators/">Jamstack</a> and after looking through many different generators I finally landed on <a href="https://www.getzola.org/">Zola</a></p> <h2 id="setting-up-zola">Setting up Zola<a class="post-anchor" href="#setting-up-zola" aria-label="Anchor link for: setting-up-zola"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <p>Getting started with Zola was both easy and a bit confusing:</p> <ul> <li>Installing and getting it running is super easy</li> <li>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</li> </ul> <p>I installed the first minimal theme focused on blogging that I liked <a href="https://github.com/ebkalderon/terminus">terminus</a></p> <h3 id="installation">Installation<a class="post-anchor" href="#installation" aria-label="Anchor link for: installation"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h3> <p>I'm sadly still on windows, but at least installing zola there is as easy as it gets using <code>winget</code></p> <pre data-lang="powershell" style="background-color:#272822;color:#f8f8f2;" class="language-powershell "><code class="language-powershell" data-lang="powershell"><span>winget install getzola.zola </span></code></pre> <p>And that's all, now we are ready to create a new site by running <code>zola init</code> inside of an empty folder</p> <h3 id="choosing-a-theme">Choosing a theme<a class="post-anchor" href="#choosing-a-theme" aria-label="Anchor link for: choosing-a-theme"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h3> <p>The official docs are a <strong>trap</strong>, 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.</p> <p>So rather choose a theme right away, install it depending to it's documentation and look how they have setup their templates.</p> <p>For <code>terminus</code> <em>(and I think most other themes)</em> the best way to install is to clone a <code>git submodule</code> into the <code>themes</code> folder.</p> <pre data-lang="sh" style="background-color:#272822;color:#f8f8f2;" class="language-sh "><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span>git submodule add https://github.com/ebkalderon/terminus.git themes/terminus </span></code></pre> <h2 id="next-steps">Next steps<a class="post-anchor" href="#next-steps" aria-label="Anchor link for: next-steps"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <p>Other than filling up the site with some posts, I also want to look into other things:</p> <ul> <li>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</li> <li>Actually hosting the site, either on <a href="https://docs.codeberg.org/codeberg-pages/">Codeberg pages</a>, or some cheap hosting service</li> <li>Venture into self-hosting and write about that</li> </ul>