• TL;DR I made this website using Zola to discuss my work/interests.

People kept asking, so I thought I'd make my first post to answer their questions.

Why make a personal website?

I wanted a place to showcase my work and post about my interests. I'll do my best to keep the about me and resume pages up to date. I plan to make this blog mostly tech-focused, but I have many interests that will probably make their way into here (like my love of WW2 movies).

How did you make this website?

I chose Zola for the static site generator since it's relatively simple and fast. Also Rust is cool (⌐■_■). I love how easy it is to extend a theme to suit my needs. For example, I based my theme off of the Terminimal theme and to add more to the templates, I just needed to create one with the same name and a line like this at the top:

{% extends "terminimal/templates/index.html" %}

I could then add any block I wanted to replace in this template. For example, this is how I added an emoticon variable and social media icons to the footer.

{% block footer %}
<div class="footer-emoticon", style="display: block; margin-bottom: 40px;">
    {% if page.extra and page.extra.emoticon is defined %}
        {{ page.extra.emoticon }}
    {% elif section.extra and section.extra.emoticon is defined %}
        {{ section.extra.emoticon }}
    {% else %}
        {% block emoticon %}
        ('_')
        {% endblock emoticon %}
    {% endif %}
</div>
<div class="footer-soc-icons", style="display: block;">
   {% for link in config.extra.social_links %}
        <a
        href="{{ link.url }}"
        class="social-link"
        style="text-decoration: none;"
        aria-label="{{ link.name | title }}"
        target="_blank"
        rel="noopener"
        >
            ...
        </a>
        {% if not loop.last %} | {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
</div>
...
{% endblock footer %}

Source code

For hosting, I chose GitHub pages since it's free and easy to set up. Also, the Zola docs have a nice guide for setting this up.

Overall, I enjoyed creating this site and I'm happy with how it turned out. I also liked learning about Zola and I plan to add more features, such as a light mode toggle.