I did it - finally restarted this blog! 🙌

Why

I'll keep this short - there are others who are more expressive and have shared their opinion on everything Zola does for them - go read those instead. Here is the shortform for me.

I found it tedious to maintain a Jekyll site and the various plugins that you needed for what I believe should be the built-in behaviour.

On every new machine I used, I found myself using a Docker image for building the Jekyll site locally so I could get the magic combination correct to have it always working, until it eventually didn't work anymore.

Preserving hard-links

I started with trying to look out for a way to migrate my existing Jekyll posts while also preserving the hard-links to them. I came across Eugene Baichenko's writings and script which I used and got myself up and running in no time.

After some more research, I learnt that Zola supports aliases which lets you preserve your hard-links without needing to build the directory structure required to keep those links. Those links just redirect to the new Zola ones, which was fine by me.

Preserving page highlighting

Zola happily seems to support YAML as a frontmatter, so for legacy posts, I didn't need to update the format and instead just include the new properties where needed (e.g. disabling table of contents on certain posts). Along the way, I also learnt that YAML supports references and inheritance - wild stuff.

Existing syntax highlighting is also preserved and at most, I needed to update the language shortcodes to match Zola's (e.g. objc to m). In miscellaneous posts I seemed to have used Liquid templating, but that too wasn't hard to search-and-replace.

Incremental migration from Jekyll

Doing the actual migration required slowly changing things over in my spare time. Starting off the blog in a sub-directory /jonalmeida first to get everything working there. Finally, removing the existing blog from the root directory and moving the contents of /jonalmeida into the root.

Final thoughts

It seems like most of the audience for Zola are coming from other Static Site Generators platforms.

I haven't found the Zola documentation to be spectacular so it took me a bit to understand what aliases were and how to use them - I came across the original issue to support aliases which linked to the Hugo docs that eventually told me what I needed to know. I'm also not complaining too much since this is a community-driven project; happy to use it's used by big players like Fastmail too so maybe this is something where more corps can support too.

In another case, I moved to Zola because I wanted separate feeds for each tag and I couldn't figure out to get this to work even though I had already enabled it with this block:

taxonomies = [
    {name = "categories", feed = false},
    {name = "tags", feed = true},
]

This must be my own shortsightedness though, because it seems obvious to others.

All in all though, I'm quite happy with where I've gotten to and I find the Zola and Tera templating combination far less intimidating.

Let's see where this takes me.