Tech that drives this site and some commentary about how the choices were made.

Current Techology

• Static content generated by Zola
• Zola theme is DeepThought
• Revision control is provided by git
• The content is served (for FREE!) via Cloudflare Pages
• Github is the interface to Cloudflare Pages

The long and winding road... That led to this site

Years ago I decided that I wanted an always-on presence on the Internet. I didn't want to rely on resources hosted from my home, nor did I want to open any ports from my router into my home network. I did a little research at the time and settled on a European provider called 1-and-1 who are now called IONOS. I registered my domain and had them handle my e-mail and DNS services.

I opted for a hosted instance of Joomla because it was a quick and easy deployment from the provider. I put all this together over a weekend and basically got a landing page created. I've fought with Joomla off and on over the years but I finally decided that I just want a static site - preferably using a tool that lets me maintain the content in Markdown so I can have a nice looking site without needing to design my own CSS and such. I don't want to become a front-end programmer just to host my own blog nor do I want to host my blog on a CMS just because that was easy to set up years ago. Another great thing about Zola is that it supports embedding HTML into the markup when greater control is desired. This has already made me a happy camper.

I dug around for a few hours and found a short list of candidates. I almost chose Hexo until I learned that Zola is written in Rust. I am determined to become proficient with Rust before the end of the year. Since Zola is Open Source and written in Rust I decided it might be a good opportunity to look at some real-world usage. It will also provide an opportunity for me should I decide that I want to support the Zola community (although I have other projects in mind).

Since I'm no longer working and not overly inclined to return to work anytime soon I'm looking to reduce expenses. One day while researching Cloudflare I discovered that Cloudflare Pages might be an excellent way to host my site and also reduce my small annual spend with IONOS. I could probably do something similar staying with IONOS but I'm growing tired of the sales calls trying to up-sell me on services.

I also considered the combination of jekyll and Github Pages. Given that I need to manage my custom domain registration, the associated DNS records, and other no-cost functionalities provided by Cloudflare I opted not to go this route.