Every year or so I revisit this blog and think of a new way to do it. Mainly I view this as a learning exercise, so I try to find something new and interesting that I would like to try.
Recently I have been interested in static site generators. The previous version of Overstatement was build with Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator that is very popular. Since I know a little Ruby, it made sense to me to use Jekyll. Jekyll is robust, with a large community behind it. If you need help, it's easy to find. If you are looking to implement a feature, someone else has probably already implemented it.
There are two downsides to Jekyll in my view. One is that it is slow. Compared to other options, Jekyll generated even my little web site noticeably slower. Since you only generate the site when you have to update it, this isn't a really big deal for me, but for more active sites this could be a deal breaker.
The second downside, and this is an issue with a lot of software these days, is Jekyll's dependencies. A static site is by nature a secure site, generally speaking. But Jekyll has had a few security concerns with some of its dependencies in the past. Of course, things were patched and updated. But if I have a choice between a lot of dependencies or not many dependencies, I say the fewer the better.
So for this new version of Overstatement, I went with Zola. Zola is a fairly new option, and instead of Ruby it is built with Rust. I was interested in Rust because it is a lower level programming language, which means it is fast. Rust generates my current site in 85 milliseconds. That's almost instantaneous. Rust is also open source and is being developed in a transparent manner. I think it is one of the more interesting programming language projects going on right now, for what little I know.
Oh, and Zola has no dependencies at all. Zero. It's just Zola. That keeps it fast and simple.
Zola's biggest downside is that because it is newer, and a little niche, it has a smaller community. It was harder to find help online, and the documentation, while good, is incomplete. I figured everything out for the most part, but it would have been helpful for me to know a little Rust. Another thing to learn!
Zola is also pretty simple. It does not have the robust feature set that Jekyll has. My site is simple, so Zola being simple is perfect. But I imagine a more complex site would be challenging to implement in Zola. I hope Zola continues to grow and gain more support and features, while remaining fast and reliable.
One feature I really liked was "shortcodes", a concept the Zola team stole from WordPress. These little micro-templates make it super easy to reuse code and pass parameters around as needed. I used shortcodes for my vimeo embeds and to generate a gallery. I also like the way Zola encourages you to store assets and blog content together. At first this was counter-intuitive to me, but it made more sense as I used it. Images and documents are stored in a folder with blog content making it super easy to include them in the blog post and also keeping everything logically together.
One other change I made with this version of Overstatement is I converted all the CSS to Tailwind. I have used Tailwind on a few projects now and I'm starting to really like it. It's biggest advantage to me is how easy it is to change and update. You can design almost anything with it, and you can customize things as you need to. So, it feels like it can be the super-framework for a good long time. I can completely change the look of Overstatement without changing my framework at all.
All in all this was a fun project. I love learning new things. I look forward to seeing how/if Zola evolves. Hopefully, this version of Overstatement can serve the Overstatement community for a few years. Or until I want to learn something else.