After almost a decade, I decided to migrate to something a little more modern and easy to use. The previous version of this site was based on:

• grunt
• wintersmith
• purecss
• Various grunt, babel and npm modules, most of which are outdated, not maintained nor are necessary for such a simple site.

I definitely needed something more simple and straighforward. After considering Hugo & Hakyll I stumbled upon Zola which provides all I ever dreamed of:

• A single executable binary with every included
  • syntax highlighing
  • Jinja2 inspired templating
  • sass compilation
  • no third-party plugins

Zola is incredibly easy to use. I only had to download the latest binary for linux and move it to /usr/local/bin.

$ zola init alexnormand.com
$ cd alexnormand.com
$ zola serve

The rest is clearly documented and easy to reason about.

Building this site with zola takes ~100ms (on an very old macbook pro running Debian stable) which is a fraction of the time it used to take to build.

I also migrated to netlify which is more adapted to my needs (this site was previously hosted on Google App Engine). I simply need to git push to my github repo master branch and netlify will build and deploy the changes automatically in seconds.

Zola and netlify make the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. An additional bonus to all this is a perf improvement in page load :).