I recently disabled my Obsidian Publish subscription. This marks the second time I’ve switched my static site generator. Initially, I switched away from Hugo after seeing a really nice Obsidian site, char.blog. I did like the layout of the homepage, along with the image you could place in the top left.
There were still a couple of gripes I had with the obsidian layout. Although I had no blog posts published, I imagined that once you reached a sufficient number of posts, the sidebar would be too cluttered, and searching through posts would be annoying. Searching in this context, referring to:
- Combing through the posts, trying to identify interesting posts despite small text and indentation levels, or
- Using the title search that can be added to the top of the sidebar. This will spawn a popup that greps through all articles. It is noticeably slow.
This devolves into needing some sort of tags/posts directory, which defeats the purpose of the sidebar. Despite this, being able to directly write in Obsidian was nice, and publishing changes was just two quick commands away.
Now, it was time to choose another theme for my personal site. The choice of Zola over Hugo was mainly because Zola was more simple (and maybe written in Rust…). Next, I started looking for a theme.
The original theme I had with my Hugo site was a bearblog. I enjoy the simpliciy of bearblog, but again, I disliked the blog viewing.
The template was pretty narrow - it felt like I was viewing something on a phone. Some of these more center-aligned themes have smaller text to account for this, but it looked a bit awkward. After seeing the Obsidian publish style, my preferences changed.
I also dislike the terminal-looking style of many themes. Writing looks best in fonts that aren’t made for code.
After looking through the Zola theme directory, I saw a theme that said it was inspired off this site: https://zunzuncito.oriole.systems/. I really liked the look of the original site - and choose it over the theme itself. I cloned the website (the author thankfully provided a git repo), and made the content my own.
The main strength of this template is how the blogs look. I am also quite opinionated when it comes to fonts, but I liked the one this came with.
The only problem is… that I don’t have any blog posts. I will try to write more, so that I can eventually change the landing page of this website from my About page to a list of all the blogs I’ve written.
I did like the idea of having a page for seperate blog posts. Currently, posts are listed in chronological order, all on one page. I will need to make my own “post directory” for categorization. At some point, I would probably prefer the “blogs” hyperlink in the header to point to a directory, instead of a dump of each post individually.
I also need an easier workflow for adding images. Images look best on websites like this when they are centered, but those CSS rules shouldn’t be too difficult to make. Ideally, I want something that is as seamless as copy pasting an image into Google Docs.
Zola’s simplicity should allow me to change what I want relatively easily. For now, I will stick with this theme/SSG for a while.