Henning Gebhard

It is kind of ironic that I have been developing websites (among other things) for many years now, but I still did not have a personal website. I have my personal cloud and frankly, I could hardly live without it. I have my Gitea instance and I could hardly work without it. I host about a dozen other web-based services for which I have (or at least had at some point) a need – but there simply never was a need for a personal site.

To be honest, there is still no “need” in the real sense of the word. But it has its uses. I think.

Maybe I am wrong and it has not. But even then creating this site was a very good excuse to learn my way around Zola. Zola is a ‘Static Site Generator’, a piece of software that converts some text files into all the HTML, CSS etc. files which make up a website. Unlike software like Wordpress, its job is done after this conversion. The page you are currently reading has not been generated by a script on the webserver, and its content has not been queried from a database. There is no database. There is no script on the webserver. This makes the side of me which appreciates simplicity very happy. But this also means that the whole layout, theming, etc. from the ground up had to be created manually. This makes the side of me which appreciates dealing with complexity very happy.

I will probably write a bit more about Zola in the future. For now, I only want to intone the “traditional incantation to the programming gods” (S. Cozens) to bring good fortune upon a new software project:

"Hello, World!"