Blog The Third: Nix and Zola

Repeatedly switching Site Generators is something that happens to everyone, right?

Thawing Out

I'd initially really enjoyed Cryogen, and mucked about for a while under the hood. However, it felt overbearing, hard to modify in it's thoroughness. I wanted something lighter, something I could really dig into. For a while that was Quickblog. Another month or so was spent mucking about in there, but I grew to dislike how opinionated the codebase was. With no disrespect to Borkdude intended, it felt like a very personal project.

And then I realized. The whole point of having a blogging engine, was to actually write blog posts. With my focus on tweaking things, and building my own version of everything, I'd stopped writing, and gotten stuck down a rabbithole of implementation.

A New Kind Of Snowflake

I also had started getting into Nix, and been using it more and more. First a laptop, then my server, then my desktop all got nixified and flaked.

The ability to tweak things and get them wrong without giving up on a readily avialible working system intrigued me, and the knowledge I was gaining was great. It's filtered through Nix's lense, but I have learned more about Linux, systemd, and how to compose a system than I had before, simply from being able to poke stuff.

There's so much to learn still, but I wanted to start putting things to use, outside of managing dev environments and my systems. I wanted to learn Nix as a build tool.z

A static site generator and my blog seemed a great place to start.

...Zola?

Not wanting to be sucked down into the generator's details, I opted for Zola. It's in Rust, a language I want to learn down the road, and it met all my requirements for the blog.

With a basic flake in place, I migrated my content over to Zola's preferred setup. I picked out a theme, and started to work on Github Actions for my CI.

Only there was a hitch. Zola wanted to use submodules, and I could not get Nix to cooperate on them.

I mucked around for a while, and then in the name of having a working blog, opted to make a very quick theme using Bulma. The skeleton of Anemone Theme was stripped and cleaned to guide my own work, and over the course of an evening or two, things fell into place.

Teething Problems

I merged the repository histories of the new project and my prior blog, by modifying the upstream remotes and merging branches with --allow-unrelated. This was messier than I would have liked, because I was unsure how much information would be lost as I rebased. Ultimately, I had some purging to do at the end. From there, it was messing with Github Actions to make a workflow that worked between Nix, my name registrar, and Github.

Biggest issue turned out to be whether the site was under /public or simply / (It was the latter).

Also of note, was that my copy of my old homepage which had been placed into /static/index.html was overriding the Zola powered homepage, but in a way that didn't show up during zola serve

After all those were sorted out, and DNS propogated, my new site came up, and I couldn't be happier. There's still a lot to be done, like improving the homepage, restoring icons, and making better tag pages, but I can write blog posts now, and that's the key to having a blog ultimately.