Well, I did it. I have officially moved off of my homebrewed, Emacs-based static site generator and on to an officially supported publishing platform, Zola. At the same time, I’ve created a fresh new minimalist CSS theme that I like a lot. I hope you do too.
A few things really appealed to me about Zola. First, it’s written in Rust, a language I’ve become extremely enamoured of. Second, it’s got a very active community and it’s a platform I can hack on and contribute to. If I find bugs, I can log them and either I or someone else can tackle them. That’s appealing.
The changeover went pretty smoothly, but it was extremely tedious. I did a
lot of copying content over by hand, exporting org-mode files to
Markdown wherever I could, and then hand-fixing links to point to the new
structure. Zola is a little bit opinionated about what they (and other
site generators like Hugo) would call “Ugly
URLs”, or what I would call
“regular old plain URLs”, that is, URLs ending in .html. Zola prefers
that all pages be a directory containing an index.html file instead. I
don’t love it, but that’s OK, I can work with it.
I have created a pretty extensive list of nginx rewrite rules to create permanent redirects from the old structure to the new structure. I hope I didn’t miss anything.
There’s also a new Atom XML feed for RSS readers. I’ve created a permanent redirect from the old RSS 2.0 feed. I don’t know if that’s the recommended way to move feeds or not, hopefully I haven’t flaunted any web standards in doing so.
And finally, this also means that in the future, I’ll probably write a lot less about my blogging hacks, and I think that’s a good thing.
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