Notes about this site

This page serves as both a description of this site as well as containing some useful links and tips for the development of it.

Zola - static site generator

This website is built with Zola, a Rust-based static site generator. Why did I choose it? It came as a recommendation from a friend, the templating engine (Tera) seemed to model Jinja2 closely, it has Cloudflare deployment support and seemed like a modern choice to get started with static site generators, as this was my first proper foray since messing around with Jekyll for a week a long time ago.

Some useful links:

• Overview is a good introduction and mini-tutorial to getting started
• Front matter reference for Pages and Sections
• Zola uses CommonMark + pulldown-cmark, so refer to this when you're needing to implement something in Markdown that you haven't before

Some tips:

• Set up your .gitignore to ignore the public folder

Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare is used to host the static site. The instructions don't actually work (Cloudflare's environment has misconfigured or doesn't include Zola), so I updated the build command in Cloudflare as per this suggestion on GitHub.

Although it downloads the binary each deployment it adds a negligible amount to the overall build time (the site is fully deployed in under 30 seconds). I can also use Cloudflare's latest deployment image.

I like Cloudflare as it sets up a connection with your GitHub repo automatically - once connected I can push commits to my repo and have the changes deployed to my live site (this site is pretty low-stakes so I'm fine with pushing directly to main) without having to do anything else.

Goat Counter

A privacy-friendly, free, and dead simple analytics platform, Goat Counter is a neat way to get more insight into the world of analytics.

Instant Page

Drop-in link preloading/prefetching. Most web frameworks include options for preloading links (e.g. SvelteKit, Nuxt), but this is not built into Zola, and so a third-party JS library is required. Not really critical, but nice to make an already snappy site even snappier.

Costs

All of this tech is free to use, therefore the only cost was purchasing the domain name (NZD$34.50) and the yearly renewal cost (also NZD$34.50).