this site has undergone many an iteration.

i can never seem to settle on one thing. partly because i am indecisive and like shiny things, partly because nothing i've tried was the right fit.

the first iteration of this site was, like most web projects nowadays, a nextjs site. it was mostly fine... i think vercel has done some very technologically impressive things with nextjs but it introduced way too much complexity for what i was doing.

why is my static website 400mb?

another thing that irked me with nextjs is the vendor lock in. i know there is opennext but the fact that there has to be an opennext just felt wrong.

from a complete overkill solution, i tried to reject the last 20 year of web development tooling, and for the better part of a year, this site was just raw, handwritten html in a folder being served by caddy on my vps.

this worked great. it was easy to update, easy to manage, easy to understand. there was no hidden complexities of what was going on where. i had full control. when i wanted to update a page or create a new page, i just scp it to my vps and its done. there was a giant issue though...

that of course was that i had to write every single page by hand. it was incredibly annoying and i had effectively 0 code reuse (templating). leading me to look for a minimal static site generator.

this is when i found zola. zola is a static site builder written in rust with tera templating. having used an exorbitant amount of go templating tera was a breath of fresh air.

this theme is a fork of still, a minimal theme focused on long form writing. idk who the author is but he did a great job. this theme reminds me the unix philosphy whereby each tool only does one thing but does that one thing very very well.

this site is built using a personal fork of zola with extra tera functions and filters.

you can find the source of this site here.