Remember when I created this blog, and in my first post, I said:
expect some small to medium-sized changes to this site in the near future
Small to medium-sized my-
When I created this blog, I didn't know much about static site generators. I hadn't heard of the Jamstack static site generator list. I only knew about Eleventy. Coupled with some tutorials, I was able to figure out the process in a day or two (I'm fuzzy on the details).
Jamstack static site generator list
But then I left my blog to rot. I, for the most part, forgot about it. I just left it there.
A few months ago, I was on the previously mentioned Jamstack static site generator list, when I discovered Zola. The premise seemed great: one single, fast binary with everything, written in Rust instead of JavaScript (in the time since I put up the blog, I acquired negative views for JavaScript, especially on desktops). I thought that switching to Zola would help me ditch both a JavaScript program and npm, which was installed exclusively for Eleventy.
Then, about a few days ago, I remembered about this blog again. I realised that I'll likely never post on here if I stay on my current setup, so I decided to switch to Zola.
It was simpler to switch static site generators since I didn't have to transfer over a large amount of posts over; I ended up creating a new site from scratch and transferring some of the information over.
My experience with Zola was better than my experience with Eleventy. When I was creating this site in Eleventy, I ran into many roadblocks, like trying to make newer blog posts appear higher up on the blog index. The tutorial I followed to create the site was outdated, so even though it worked, I still had to figure things out myself, which led to a poorly made site which wasn't as featureful as I wanted it to be.
flaMEd fury's Eleventy tutorial
When I was creating this site in Zola, I felt much more comfortable. Configuration felt better, and I knew about more extensive (official) documentation. My experiences may have been affected by my overall increase in technical knowledge, but I partially did feel better with Zola.
While this isn't meant to be a tutorial, my general process was to follow their [overview](https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overview) and other documentation, diverging when necessary to use themes and other things, such as using YAML front matter instead of TOML. Looking at the example Zola Bearblog site was also helpful.
Examle Zola Bearblog site source
In command form, my process was about the following:
zola init blog # initialise the blog; answer the prompts cd blog git submodule add https://codeberg.org/alinnow/zola-bearblog themes/zola-bearblog vim config.toml # work on config.toml # then copied my one blog post to the new site
You can also look at the source of this blog at the below URL for a reference.
https://codeberg.org/Pixelo789/pages-src
Overall, my experience with Zola was satisfactory, and I'd likely use it again for future sites. In addition, let's hope there aren't any unforseen major changes to this site in the future!