This site's getting rusty

| ~2 minute read


Up until now, my site was going well but now it's gotten pretty rusty. You see what I did there?

Yes, dear reader, we have switched from Hugo, the static site generator I've been using for almost two years. I still love Hugo, it's very fast and it's written in my favourite programming language; and I'm familiar enough with go's template engine, so Hugo was a breeze.

BUT it's time for Go to go, because rust is hip nowadays. So, my friends, I re-wrote this site in.. Zola! Zola is a static site generator written in rust and while Hugo claims to be "the fastest", Zola is a big contender. I obviously still have the files from the Hugo site, so I just did a quick test by running hugo and zola build; it might be inaccurate but it took them 45ms and 48ms respectively to build my website! Note that my Hugo theme is slightly larger!

I wanted to redesign my website anyways (it's MUCH nicer now) so I just went and did this in Zola as I thought I'd also learn a new tool in the process. I was going for Jekyll but then randomly came across Zola, and I'm very happy I did. Zola is so much simpler than Hugo and I got the site converted from Hugo to Zola very quickly.

I'd definitely consider Zola for later projects; but my existing hugo sites (except this one) will probably continue to be in hugo, because it'd be a waste of time without any real advantage converting them.