Zola starter set

Note: Further development suspended as of 2021-09-11.

This is a starter set for the Zola static site generator (SSG), based on the appearance of my website at brycewray.com.

See the online demo.

How to use

1. Clone this to a local repo.
2. Make appropriate changes to config.toml to conform to your site’s parameters.
3. Once you have installed Zola, run zola serve from your terminal app. You can then view the site on your computer.
4. Read the sample posts and their Markdown files to see how everything works.
5. Edit the content to make it your own!
6. When ready, deploy the site to your chosen host.

What’s under the hood

For Zola users unused to dealing with JavaScript from Node.js plugins and dependencies, this repo may not be your cup of tea, and that’s perfectly understandable.* However, if you’re willing to take a trip to the Dark Side, it does offer some interesting add-on possibilities. (That said, Zola’s single-binary, nearly-everything-out-of-the-box approach has served it well and is impressive.) In package.json, you’ll find dependencies that make possible the use of PostCSS and Tailwind CSS. The latter includes the still-in-preview @tailwindcss/jit library; read more about it in this announcement.

In addition, there are Zola’s built-in image processing capabilities. (The real site’s repo uses Cloudinary rather than having the images in the repo and processing them as such.)

Handling footnotes

Please see /content/about/index.md for information concerning how Zola handles footnotes, since this is different than you’ll likely find on other SSGs.

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* If you don’t care for dealing with Node.js dependencies, you may be interested in another Zola repo, zola_solo, which offers the same image processing but uses SCSS through Zola’s built-in SCSS support instead of Tailwind CSS and PostCSS.