So I finally got around to overhauling this old site. Been meaning to for a long time, but I never really had the opportunity to do so. The old version was all handwritten html, which looked okay, but was a real pain in the behind to update with new work, much less include something like a proper blog.

I'd been looking at static site generators for a while. If you don't know what they are - they basically let you write posts or content in Markdown or some similar 'language' and then process all your posts into static HTML pages your website can serve without needing some kind of special serverside service or database. Hugo and Jekyll are the best known examples I think - Github supports both via github pages.

However, I found both of those frameworks to be really difficult to use to get theming up and running. One thing I really wanted to do was to have the generator create lists of pages, sections/categories, etc and be able to generate menus and indices without me manually having to add them. I found both Jekyll and Hugo to be rather complex to get started with, so I shelved the idea whilst working on my most recent set of contract work.

Once that began to wind down though, I thought I'd look a bit deeper to see what other static site generators, or SSGs, existed and I eventually came across Zola.

It's a single executable, written in rust, and the syntax for theming and styling, as well as the template language it uses, were simple enough I didn't have to go crazy trying to refresh years-old webdev knowledge just to get started.

So here you go - new site, new blog - I'm going to start updating this more regularly and talking a little bit about my personal projects as well as a smattering of details regarding my contract work where appropriate.