Hello. I'm Citty. I've also been attempting to get a blog hosted for several hours now, and now have opinions as to how you should not do it.

The good choice

I picked Zola as a static site generator. I picked this because it's written in Rust, which I have the skillset to even attempt to maintain if it were to be abandoned. Zola is actually pretty good so far, and I've liked working with it.

Also we have syntax highlighting! Still trying to figure out KaTeX though in case I ever decide to torture others using the power of math.

Bad choice number 1: Attempting to write a theme on a deadline.

I still want to build a theme from scratch. I tried building a theme from scratch. It turns out that HTML and CSS are required to build a theme, and when you're bad at them, it makes it rather difficult. Shocking revelation, I'm sure.

Bad choice number 2: PaperMod

Apologies to cydave, but I still don't understand half the choices in this thing. I don't want a bunch of social icons on the front page. I don't want to write the front page of my website's description in HTML in a string in a TOML file. I went with a static site generator so I could avoid writing HTML for everything. Tag based RSS feeds are nice though if I'll ever get that working.

Bad choice number 3: Cloudflare Pages

It's free, I bought the domain from Cloudflare anyways, and everything else has put me in any mood but to try and wire this up to nginx on some machine I run. Sorry.

UPDATE: Cloudflare Pages still hasn't fixed an outstanding issue that means that Zola sites just don't work with their default build system. Neat, thanks Cloudflare.

Am I going to end up writing my own theme?

I hope so. Will give this one a try for a bit though.

Who are you anyways?

Good question.