Maungawhau IT

Since 2015 this static site has been built from Markdown files using a custom Javascript and Gulp build process - described in the Site Refresh post. I have often wanted to move it over onto a "normal" static site generator tool, such as Hugo, but was put off by the migration needed to change templates again, and make my layout and CSS work in a new theme system.

Then in the New Year down-time I found Zola.

Zola is a Rust static site generator, and uses the Jinja2 templating engine that I am comfortable with from this site, and working with Django. So the migration of the templates was very easy.

It is set up to compile Sass by default, so my CSS was used without change.

The biggest change, was to convert the markdown front-matter from YAML to TOML format, and that was only needed when I wanted to use the Taxonomies feature.

So now the site is generated by Zola, and looks pretty much the same as before. The next change will be to swap out the Google Web Starter Kit (which is not supported any more) for a supported CSS framework. At this point I am looking at either Bulma, Tailwind, or the old warhorse Bootstrap.