How I migrated this blog from Eleventy to Zola

It's been a while. Eleven months, according to the timestamp on my last post — which was, as some of you noticed, about migrating to Eleventy. The good news: the blog you are reading right now is no longer built with Eleventy. The bad news is the same news.

Last Tuesday I sat down to finally write the Rust error-handling post I've been promising. I ran npm install on my Eleventy blog first, because it had been a few months. Forty-one seconds later I had 214 packages looking for funding, 3 moderate severity vulnerabilities, and a deprecation warning from something called inflight that I have never knowingly used. I ran du -sh node_modules: 1.2 GB. To render one Markdown file.

I want to be clear that Eleventy itself is excellent software. This is not Eleventy's fault. But Eleventy stands on JavaScript, and JavaScript stands on npm, and npm stands on a hill of transitive dependencies that audibly shifts beneath you in the night.

Enter Zola

Zola is a static site generator written in Rust. It is one binary. There is no package.json. There is no lockfile. There is nothing to install except the thing itself:

$ brew install zola
$ zola build
Building site...
Done in 38ms.

38 milliseconds. Eleventy was taking 1.4 seconds, which I used to think was fast. Before that, Astro took 9. Before that — I have a spreadsheet, don't worry about it.

The migration took one evening:

• Front matter went from YAML to TOML. sed did most of it.
• I wrote my own templates this time. All three of them. Base, index, page. I am done with themes; themes are how they get you.
• Syntax highlighting is built in. Dark mode is the only mode. RSS is off because, let's be honest, both subscribers left during the Astro era.
• Still Markdown files in git, still deployed from a main push. Cool URIs don't change — every post keeps its /year/month/slug/ address, same as it's been since the WordPress days.

Why bother

The usual reasons, which I believe a little more each time I type them: I own my content. The site is fast because there is nothing in it. And honestly, the less time I spend maintaining the blog, the more time I have for writing.

I know how that sentence reads, given the archive. I checked the archive too. The archive is one post and it's this one. Posts written about blog setups: 1. Posts written about Rust error handling: coming soon.

No, really. The friction is gone now. One binary, three templates, 38 milliseconds. There is nothing left to migrate to.

— Olav