Migrating the Website from Hugo to Zola
Hello again after a long hiatus. I've decided to change my static site generator from Hugo to Zola. The main difference is that Hugo uses Go under the hood while Zola uses Rust. However, those languages are just used under the hood and knowledge of them is not necessary. So why would I make the switch and deal with the new syntax and organization of Zola? Honestly, my reasons aren't great. I just knew I was in a rut of not understanding how to customize my site in Hugo, and I had very little motivation to figure out how to do so. Zola is shinier and newer to me, and I also feel like I'm supporting the Rust ecosystem in a small way, which I think is giving me that small motivation I need to keep going. I knew that I wanted to make the switch eventually, but it was on the backburner until I saw Chevy Ray's Zola site (chevyray.dev). From the colors to the fonts, the design was just great, and made me feel just a tiny bit embarrased about my own dilapidated Hugo site.
The old joshlau.xyz homepage. It worked, but it's not quite up to my quality standards.
So I installed Zola and did some basic setup. Building the site works mostly the same as Hugo, so transferring over hasn't been too difficult. You might be impressed by how much better the site looks compared to the old version, but it's really no credit to me but instead thanks to Speyll's 'anemone' website theme, which is looking quite good out of the box. Of course I would like to customize each detail according to my own wild design ideas, but it's going to take some deeper digging into the documentation of Zola. So for now I'm focusing on the migration and basic functionality, and if I get around to it hopefully I'll start redesiging bits and pieces of the site.