About This Site

Jan 26, 2025

#zola #static-site-generator #serene-theme #netlify

This post covers the technical details of how this site was built, for those who are curious about the stack and setup.

Technology Stack

This site is built using modern static site generation tools:

Zola Static Site Generator

Zola is a fast static site generator written in Rust. I chose Zola for several reasons:

Performance - Built in Rust, it's incredibly fast
Simplicity - Easy to set up and configure
Features - Built-in syntax highlighting, Sass compilation, and more
Single Binary - No complex dependencies to manage

Serene Theme

The Serene theme provides a clean, minimal design that's perfect for a personal blog and portfolio site. Key features include:

Clean, readable typography
Dark/light mode toggle
Responsive design
Code syntax highlighting
Table of contents generation
Tag and category support

Site Structure

The site is organized as follows:

mrgah.net/
├── / (landing page)
├── /blog/ (blog section)
└── /portfolio/ (coming soon)

Deployment

The site is deployed on Netlify, which provides:

Automatic builds from Git
Global CDN
Custom domain support
SSL certificates
Form handling (for future contact forms)

Development Workflow

The development process is straightforward:

Local Development: zola serve for live reloading
Content Creation: Write posts in Markdown
Git Commit: Push changes to the repository
Automatic Deployment: Netlify builds and deploys automatically

Future Enhancements

Some features I'm considering for the future:

Portfolio section with project showcases
Comment system using Giscus
Search functionality
Newsletter signup
Analytics integration

Source Code

The source code for this site will be available on GitHub soon, so you can see exactly how everything is set up.

If you're interested in building a similar site, I highly recommend checking out Zola and the Serene theme. The documentation is excellent and the setup process is quite straightforward.