Setup

2024-05-31

Technical setup

A few months ago, I stumbled over the small universe of static site generators. They are commonly used by academics to produce an endless stream of personal websites, mostly using Jekyll (a static site generator) and academicpages (a theme of Jekyll).

I chose to go on another path by using Zola, another static site generator. Besides having the benefits of being a static site generator (no databases one needs to worry about, better performance, easy transferability of posts etc.) it is also considerably faster and smaller in size compared to Jekyll.

To make everything look nice, I went with serene. Next to having a nice overall look & feel, one can insert math with KaTeX and it also has a built-in dark mode.

Modifications

For modifications, I mainly adjusted the theme according to usage.md (e.g., using a different color scheme, modifying the homepage). As I don't like spam in my inbox, I added some javascript code to hide my e-mail address from webscrapers:

templates/home.html
56    <SCRIPT type="text/javascript">

57        emailE = 'example.com'

58        emailE = ('mail' + '@' + emailE)

59        document.write('<a href="mailto:' + emailE + '">' + '{% set icon_path = "static/icon/email.svg" %}' + '{% set icon = load_data(path=icon_path) %}' + '{{ icon | safe }}' + '</a>')

60    </script>
The new color scheme didn't fit well with the default syntax highlighting colors so instead I implemented a slightly modified version of onehalf.

To-Do:

  • add opengraph compatibility (tried and failed)
  • (maybe) add hyphenation support
  • implement utterances