What does HackerNews think of zola?
A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in. https://www.getzola.org
https://github.com/getzola/zola
https://mishushakov.gumroad.com/l/mish-zola
if you need more than that for a static blog (like Gatsby/NextJS) i’d consider you unreasonable
I'm using Zola SSG (https://github.com/getzola/zola) and hosted on GitHub Pages. I write about Regular Expressions, CLI one-liners, Scripting Languages, Vim, self-publishing, etc.
Personally, I use a SSG (https://github.com/getzola/zola) + GitHub pages.
As recompense, some lesser known options for the frontend part of the JAMstack that weren't mentioned in the original post:
I had that issue with Jekyll, I just couldn't get the set up to work on my system (to be fair, I gave up easily instead of asking for help).
When I came across Zola (https://github.com/getzola/zola), I was immediately drawn by the single binary aspect.
- Zola (https://github.com/getzola/zola) a SSG that works like I wanted and had a template engine close to Jinja2. I was using Hugo at the time but can't stand Golang template engine (imagine my sadness recently when I realised what Helm Charts are using...)
- Tera (https://github.com/keats/tera): a template engine pretty close to Jinja2/Django templates - at the time it was made only Handlebars existed in Rust and it was not enough for what I needed in Zola
- kickstart (https://github.com/Keats/kickstart): an equivalent of cookiecutter from Python but trying to be more interactive/powerful as a simple binary, see the GIF in the repo for an example
- validator (https://github.com/Keats/validator): my take on Python marshmallow validations, nothing existed at the time.
So yeah, most of my open-source is re-creating libraries I use with Python in Rust.
My issue with Hugo was that it just wasn't reliable with what was in the cache so I could never trust whether what I saw was actually the state of the site and causing me to push a broken state to the remote server. Hugo is great if it works but I found it a nightmare to deal with when it doesn't.
There are countless options in Hugo (yes I understand it's powerful but I rather it just had half the option and they work as advertised), some of which at times are contradictory so searching for solutions took me ages. I have no affiliation with the zola project and am not even big on Rust. Zola just worked for me and seems a lot less "hacky" than hugo thanks to the Tera templating system.
The Author of Zola writes on his github:
> [hugo] personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator.
a sentiment that I share very much.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180714043311/https://iotdarwin...
2. I am averaging about 1 post per 2 months :(
3. GitHub, because it is free and I can use markdown. Currently using a jekyll theme, but I'm planning to switch to static-site generator like https://github.com/getzola/zola
If there was a need for it, static site generators could be scaled to tens or hundreds of thousands of pages and still finish in a few seconds. Caching partial results is always an option.
There are generators that are decently performant, like Hugo (Go) [1] or Zola (Rust) [2].
Not only is Gatsby over-engineered, it's also bloated IMO. I think one of their main selling points it that page loads seem instant. Preloading other pages in the background seems needless to me when we're talking about a simple blog. Sure, it might be good for apps, but forcing my (few) visitors to download needless mbs on desktop or mobile seems like a bad user experience to me.
https://github.com/getzola/zola,
and, looking at the readme, a bit more features than Hugo, e.g. built in search (how does that work?).
Source here: https://git.sr.ht/~andrewzah/personal-site/tree
[0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola [1]: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy [2]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/http.git