TL;DR - I created a Zola theme. You're probably looking at it right now! You can use it if you'd like!

zola-folio

Five years ago I decided to move this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll on AWS in an S3 Bucket. A little while later I automated updating the blog to use a CI/CD process via AWS CodePipeline. For insufficient reasons, I recently had the impulse to migrate this blog all over again. I have ported this blog from Jekyll to Zola and changed hosts from AWS to CloudFlare.

Some of my reasons for this are:

  1. I recently updated my laptop. I didn't feel like trying to setup a ruby environment to develop the old Jekyll blog locally.Zola is a little easier to work with. It's a single binary with no dependencies and wickedly fast by comparison.
  2. The Jekyll build via AWS CodePipeline is needlessly complicated. Last time I tried to post for the first time in a while, the pipeline didn't even work. I had to trouble shoot it before my post went live!
  3. AWS nickles and dimes customers. Charging for DNS, egress out to the internet on an S3 website, plus every get or put action on items in the bucket?
    • Right off the bat, AWS charges $0.50 for a hosted zone in Route 53 to serve the bucket to a custom domain. This is most of my monthly bill.
    • This really isn't a problem for this blog. I get basically no traffic. But I never setup CloudFront for this blog, so if my traffic suddenly spiked, I could be on the hook for a big bill with AWS!
  4. CloudFlare has a very attractive free tier for their Pages + Workers product, and a super easy integration with GitHub.
    • Unlimited static content serving, and 100,000 worker invocations per day? Yes please!

The first big obstacle was switching the Python lambdas I've been using for the interactive functionality on Has the world ended yet?, Mapping Oil and Gas Incidents in Alberta, and A puzzling Proposal to use Node.js for compatibility with CloudFlare Pages Functions. For this I just used Cursor with Claud 3.5 Sonnet. It messed up the first re-write on the M&Ms puzzle, but fixed it straight away when I pointed out the error and intended result. I've been using Cursor and Claude a lot more when developing, and it's grown on me. I've moved from being a skeptic to a promoter of using AI for coding. These tools have come a long way from the original ChatGPT and tools like gpt-engineer.

Another impediment to my migration was the theme. I really like the *folio theme I found on Jekyll and have been using since migrating from Wordpress. I made the somewhat crazy decision to to fork the *folio theme to Zola. It's a fork rather than a faithful port, because I found myself starting to fix and customize several things through the process.

In the end, none of the above are particularly great reasons to justify all the time and effort I put into the migration. I was just caught up in a desire to change things. And sometimes that's ok. It's nice to have personal space where I can make decisions that are bad from a financial or time management perspective. I feel like I learn and grow the most pursuing these little curiosities!