After looking around for a good tool to build a personal website, I first came across elm, but due to lack of a 1.0 and seemingly little-to-no progress on the repo I went looking some more and came across zola. Getting started with a project was pretty straightforward... but there were definitely some challenges!

Firstly, every theme has its own variables to set and organization for getting something up and running. For example, one theme might want a folder structure like

├───content
│   ├───blog
│   └───pages

while others might everything under content or use different names. This requires some trial and error, as despite each theme having some instructions, it seems mostly to be a 'figure it out yourself'.

Secondly it was strange to have this hybrid handlebars / markdown style for things, but I am not a web-developer by any means, so maybe this is normal. But basically, one can define templated HTML with {% block content %} but then later put in the content folder something like below:

+++
title = "Magnum Opus"
+++

However, despite this feeling weird to me at least, getting something up and running is not too bad and feels far easier compared to getting something up and running a decade ago...

I will continue to catalog how this site progresses in future blogs, along with other content, so hope you enjoy!