This is the repository for my personal website using Zola -- a static website generator written in rust.
I decided to use Zola for a few reasons: first and foremost, I'm not really doing anything super intense which would require a heroku dyno or AWS/Azure. I could easily have thrown something together with a Node/Django/Flask/Spring Boot/Flutter backend, but realistically speaking I may update the content on these pages every once in a while; I may update my resume, add a new project description file, but that's about it. Second, I'm a big fan of markdown and Zola's content pages use markdown. Lastly, cost. I'm an unemployed new grad, so putting all of that time and money into a website that I wouldn't realistically be updating every day or week seems like a waste.
Zola uses this neat thing called "Shortcode" to fill in content. For example in my base.html file, I use shortcode in a javascript function which pushes <a/>
tags to the navbar -- reading in data from the configuration file (config.toml). It has basic loops ({% for foo in bar %} {% endfor %}) and variable
setting ({% set foo = bar %}). There are some other built-in functions which can be seen on the Zola documentation website.