Notes about this site
Published 08 May, 2024Last updated 16 May, 2024
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 or two years 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
.gitignoreto 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:
- Downloaded the
zolabinary from their GitHub Releases, - Put the binary at the root of my repo and checked it in
- Updated the Cloudflare build command to
chmod +x zola && ./zola build
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.
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).