As a technologist I've had an unloved, underutilised website for years. Since it was time to rebuild, I figured it was the perfect time to learn some "new" web technologies.

Yak Shaving

I had a few objectives in mind:

  1. My previous site was built off a fairly obscure static site generator called "toto"; I could have started a wordpress site, but I wanted to try something new.
  2. I wanted to play around with this vibe coding thing.
  3. In the past I've hosted on a servie like Github Pages, and wanted to try something else.

Ultimately I learned a bunch, but possibly should have just used wordpress or ghost to achieve a similar outcome just as quickly.

Tech Foundations

Recently I've been playing with Go, so initially I was testing Hugo. It's a well-built and quite popular static site generator - similar to Jekyll (and toto). But something about the way it operated didn't sit right with me.

I experimented with 11ty (pronounced "Eleventy"), and like Hugo I thought it was just on the wrong side of complex for what I wanted. I didn't enjoy choosing between CommonJS vs ECMAScript modules - and it guided me down a path of picking a starter framework all of which were featureful but didn't allow me to explore the problem space in a way that I wanted.

So. I landed on the Rust-based Zola. It's a single binary, opinionated but simple.

Vibe coding

I used Zed + Claude to vibe my way to a blog design that I liked. This let me focus on building the features that the blog would need in Zola, but still have something that I would enjoy looking at.

vibe design

Netlify for hosting

Github pages is fantastic for static site hosting, but I have some ideas for this site that might need a bit more than just a static back-end. So I started to explore some alternatives. Cloudflare Pages looked interesting, but seems to be in the process of being migrated to Workers? I'd heard good things about Netlify, so decided to give it a go.

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to add a function down the road, which will help me with some of the integrations I'm looking to build.

TLDR

I changed my blogging platform to a Netlify + Zola stack, and vibe coded the design 👍