So in the spirit of my blog on Consistency I spoke about how I wanted to be more consistent with posting and updating the blog. In the end, I want to just write and not deal with the as-it-was manual updating of this site. That's why I started looking into using an SSG instead, as I hoped it would mean I could write new posts and it could handle all the tedious tasks of assigning dates, updating the rss feed, putting the links and titles and text into the right places etc.
It took a lot of learning and searching but I think I finally have the site in a good spot using Zola, which is a SSG written in rust that I heard about through the blogs I follow.
The documentation is frankly a bit lacking and for the most part doing things that I thought would be intuitive (like create a template for my footer and have it be included in every site) took me more than I thought it would. A lot of the tips and tricks are held in their forum or frankly in old reddit posts.
I also removed the former //Music page because 1) it was a pain to update in the first place even though I liked the CSS I made for it and 2) it's not a page I know how to do purely with a markdown-based SSG, so more learning needed.
Growing pains aside, it has so far worked well for what I wanted. I don't need to update 4 footer sections every time I post, I don't have to manually copy and paste my articles for my new rss feed, and I can simply type new posts in markdown without worrying about broken or old links to the other stuff.
A couple things I can finally work on as well are:
- Custom tags and taxonomies allowing the blog to be filtered/searched for by topic
- Adding back in the //Music page but with better organization and less fancy shit (no JS)
- Improve upon the theme I'm using now that I can use SASS
- Automatic 'Last Updated' dates on the footer
My hope is this will become a much more active site now that I've allowed myself to not overthink or focus too much on polish.
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Thoughts? Send me an email!
kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
Feel free to remain anonymous and send it from a secure mailer!
