About this site
This page descrbibes how this site is built. It is a static site generated with Zola. The source code is available on GitHub.
Zola
Zola is a static site generator written in Rust. It is fast and consists in a single binary. I chose it because of its simplicity, as I was looking for a minimalistic solution to build my site. It uses the Tera templating engine and the Sass CSS preprocessor. Content is written in Markdown and can be organized in sections and categories.
Theme
At first, the theme for this site was based on the after-dark theme. I made some modifications to the colors and allowed for some additional text to the
index page in my fork. Themes are simply added as git submodules in the themes directory.
However, I ended up switching to the serene theme which I found to be more aligned with my vision for the site.
It supports dark mode, templates allowing for both a blog and a project page, and $\LaTeX$ rendering using KaTeX.
Deployment
The site is deployed on GitHub Pages. The gh-pages branch of the repo is used to host the built site. The master branch contains the source code.
The site is built and deployed using the zola-deploy-action GitHub action.
Workflow
New content is created by adding a new Markdown file in the content directory. The file contains a front matter with the title and date of the post, as well as any taxonomies.
Changes can be previewed locally by running zola serve which starts a local server and listens for any changes in the source file, before pushing the changes to the master branch
and having the GitHub action build and deploy the site.
Inspirations
I want sites to be simple, fast to load and free from unnecessary javascript and tracking. I was inspired by various personal and academic sites, as well as: