I can't remember how many times I've started from scratch with my blog. The problem is usually that I obsess too much over the tech and too little over the actual writing. This is yet another one of my blog "reboots".
So what's different this time?
Since I last tried blogging, I've become better at writing for my own sake. I'm incredibly happy to see that the world of personal knowledge management has taken a liking to Markdown (I'm a big fan of Obsidian).
The blog stack I've gone for this time is Zola. There are only two reasons that I went with Zola over Hugo or some other Markdown based static site generator:
- I accidentally stumbled upon it
- I like that it's a single binary
So first of all, let's just celebrate the randomness of the universe. Let's agree once and for all that decisions don't need to be rational. We don't always need a ton of research before we decide. In my case, I just went with Zola with no other reason than that I accdentally found it.
Zero dependencies is a nice addition. The build and deploy pipeline will be less complicated. I've seen complicated CI/CD. I've seen complexity explosions. One binary to build the site is nice.
Why static site generators?
For me it's mostly about owership. There are many static site generators that support Markdown. If I'm not happy with Zola over the long term, switching to something else is less of a burden. Also, the fact that my writing is in plain text files in a Git repo and not in a database only compatible with blog engine X means that I actually own my data.