I first attempted to create this blog in my 2022 summer break from university, deciding to create my own static site generator with a custom markup language to make things interesting. However, this was a bit too ambitious, and the project became a bit of a mess. It never got completed before I went back to university, and I just uploaded a blog using Hugo with a preexisting theme instead.
The time I spent on the project was not a complete waste though, as it was the inspiration for my final year project at university, which is to create a new programming language, Zonkey, that aims to make it easier for developers to create web-based GUI applications. It also gave me a good head start with my final year project as I had learnt the basics of parsing.
I was not too happy with my Hugo based website though as I wanted to have a custom design to make it unique. Although custom designs are possible with Hugo using templates, I decided to recreate my website using Zola, which uses a templating language I am already familiar with called Tera. As Zola is based on Rust, which I write most of my software in, I felt more at home with this tool in comparison to Hugo, which is based on Go.
For the design of my website, I attempted to make it visually minimalistic. The colour palette of the website is derived from my profile picture, which is a cropped die shot of an AMD Zen 2 processor that uses the same microarchitecture as the processor I am using to draft this article.
If you are interested in the source code for this website, e.g., if you are also considering creating a website with Zola, feel free to browse the source code linked at the footer of this page.