Hi everyone, welcome to my website. I've been meaning to make a website for a long time, but I've always struggled with making something that's both good looking and functional as I'm not much of a frontend guy. Because of my general lack of interest in the frontend world, I had no idea that static site generators (SSGs) existed, which make the entire process of creating a website an order of magnitude easier.

I ended up doing some research into static site generators and found Jamstack, which is a great resource for this type of stuff. Looking through the options on Jamstack, Zola caught my eye as it's written in Rust, and I am nothing if not a Rust shill. I later found out that using a SSG is completely independent of the language it is written in, but supporting Rust technology is always a win for me.

Initially, Zola's project structure was super confusing to me (and it still is to an extent). There's the basic stuff that most SSG's share, like the directory for content, a config file, templates, and a theme, but Zola has some unique parts that were increasingly confusing for me. One of them was using markdown as a form of configuration. Most SSG's, like Hugo, for example, use some sort of configuration in their markdown files through the TOML +++ section or the YAML --- section, but Zola has mandatory markdown files that are (mostly) dedicated to just configuration through _index.md files. I still don't really understand it, but I understand it enough to get this site working. I understand that it configures the section or directory, that it's found in. For example, the _index.md file for the /blog section on this site looks like this:

+++
+++

Oh, weird. Well, usually, it would hold some configuration that dictates what templates the section and pages use, what the title is, etc. I suppose mine is empty because of the theme I'm using. I found this theme on Zola's theme page, but I had a number of personal nitpicks with it, so I just decided to create my own fork of it. As of right now, I have a few things I need to change still:

  • Make the tab title read Section :: MySite instead of just Section
  • Make the dark mode not just a literal inverse of light mode

Once I settled on a theme, the development of this site was super easy. I just had to fit it to the structure I wanted and then deploy it. As of the writing of this post, this site is being deployed using Github Pages and the continuous integration from my repo is being done by the very cool Zola deploy Github action. I'm super happy with how this has all turned out, and I think I'll be sticking with this for a while.

There are still things I want to implement on this site that I haven't had the time to do today. Here's a general list that I might come back to update

  • Create an about page so I can talk about myself
  • Maybe add some images
  • Add a footer
  • Add a projects tab
  • Get some more stuff on the contact tab
  • Add a devices tab
  • (long-term) Add CV

The intended purpose of this site is mostly to write about stuff I like, which includes programming, computers, basketball, volleyball, philosophy, music, and much, much more. I have quite a lot of interests, which I'm sure I'll write about on my "about" page, and I think they will be a big part of this site as I'm still young enough to not need my website to be super professional. Another purpose of this site is to inform prospective employers about my qualifications and show that I am one of the few developers with the ability to read and write.

I also want to use this as a place to document my academic writing. As of right now, I'm a junior in high school, and I'm currently procrastinating working on my IB Philosophy IA on The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I don't know if I'll publish that one as I'm not too optimistic about it, but I do want to publish my IB Extended Essay comparing Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and another TBA philosophical writing about the nature of meaninglessness, and specifically how we as humans should handle that.

That's about it for the introduction to this site; thanks for reading. To many more!

-Lucas