After 2 years laboring in the industry, I finally decided to give my website a new look. I will try to blog more from now on, so the best thing to do is to document this refresh, particularly what I learned during the process.

I started out with a 2-file setup, index.html and style.css. It was understandable as I just learned about web and publishing on GitHub Pages, so the simplest way was the right way.

As I got nearer to the end of my university time, I jumped on the Rust bandwagon and the “build your own” trend, thus leading me to create my own templates to use with Zola. The result? I got the look I wanted that looked like I put the default Ubuntu terminal on the internet, the sections and navigation I imagined and my website built in less than a second.

Zola, in my opinion, is a good product with potential to be great. It allows users full freedom in customizing templates, themes and provides decent functionalities such as feeds and taxonomies. However, it lacks a good default theme, and the biggest pain at the time I used it was SEO. This was expected to be handled by theme creators, and that really hinders its adoption even today.

When choosing the tool for this remake, there were a few criteria that I sought for:

  • Stability: Dependability and future-proof tools triumph fancy but unstable ones. I don’t want to suddenly see my site not building because of a SSG has a breaking change.
  • Simplicity: There are just enough features that I need, with as few unnecessary decorations as possible.
  • Sane defaults: There’s no point reinventing the wheel unless you are hardcore, and that often do not go too well.

Using these criteria, Jekyll was my selection. Its default theme, minima, comes with everything I need, and GitHub Pages does support using a remote theme so I could use v3 without any hassle. From there on, I made some small tweaks to the templates, bolted on Mermaid, MathJax and giscus. That’s it.