The problem

I love self-hosting. From my experience working with NLnet I was taught the importance and (hidden) significance open source and free software development. It got me thinking about how I could host my own little corner of the internet. The awesome YunoHost got me started and through some configuration hell and poor choices, I'm now happy with a relative simple setup: Zola for blogging and building a programming portfolio, Gitea for code version management, Friendica for traversing the fediverse, maybe some more little services in the future.

So…what's the problem? Well, this website, actually. As you can perhaps tell from an [earlier post on developing my own publishing systemd service](add sources), I work best when I understand what I'm doing. And that's what's missing with Zola: I don't yet know how any of it really works. I don't know how to add features, how to try out different themes, how the Tera templating engine works.

What I'm going to do

I intend to build a Zola site from scratch locally. The great thing about Zola is that it's a static site generator reliant only on one binary. So you can build a website locally and test out changes. So, I'm now generating a default Zola directory structure and I intend to work out how the various pieces fit together.

How this fits my goals

As you can see on this website, I (re)focused on learning programming in my limited spare time. Figuring out how a static site generator works (and how you can build a templating structure yourself) could help me think about my current programming project, sec.joostagterhoek.nl. After all, building a Flask website with the Jinja templating is quite similar!

By the way, that project should change in the future too: instead of Flask, Jinja and barebones HTML and CSS, I want to turn the host lookup features into a Flask API and use ReactJS for the front end. Lots to do! Talk to you later 🌈