Constant Thinking

From Pelican to Zola: Refactoring my blog

| In General
| 2 minute read
A surreal digital garden where intricate code structures elegantly transform into growing plants. Old code blocks gracefully crumble into luminous particles, seamlessly reforming into new, refined structures. Tiny, detailed programmer robots meticulously tend to the transformation. Bonsai-like HTML trees evolve into more sophisticated forms, their leaves shimmering with embedded code snippets. The scene is bathed in soft morning light with a subtle lens flare, casting a dreamy atmosphere. Teal and amber color accents enhance the ethereal quality. The composition is harmonious and uncluttered, evoking a sense of wonder and innovation. In the style of digital surrealism with influences from contemporary digital art and futuristic aesthetics.

So, I did it again!

In the near future, I plan to blog more often (this time for real). But, meanwhile, my blogging setup felt a bit dated. So I re-factored it again. How?

  • I used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet (first 3.5, then 3.7) to help me refactor stuff. Claude lives inside my new favourite code editor, Zed.
  • Instead of Pelican, I’m now using Zola as my go-to static site generator. It’s modern, written in Rust, and thus, fast.
  • Bootstrap felt a bit too much for my needs, and I wanted to learn something new, so I switched to Tailwind. Claude helped me set up my templates and CSS classes based on my needs.

There’s so much more that changed, but I won’t bore you with the details. The key thing is, that after about 3 months of back and forth tweaking and building, I’m back blogging again! 🎉

Lessons learned:

  1. Working with an AI, especially Claude, is fun and rewarding! I worked with it on building my blog templates, including CSS, writing legacy post conversion scripts, brainstorming design ideas, pros and cons, etc.
  2. The devil is always in the details. It seemed an easy thing to do, but, even with help from an AI, it still took me about 3 months. Some of it were down to the differences between Pelican and Zola, some of it was the learning curve for new technologies, and most of it were the little details and bugs. Keeping detailed notes and a to-do-list helped me a lot – and I asked Claude for help on curating them for me, as well.
  3. A lot has changed in the world of blogging! For example, just recently, I learned about the IndieWeb, which addresses most of the issues I’ve been thinking about for a long time – and the very reasons I decided to blog more again on my own website. It’s still early days for my blog to be a true “IndieWeb” site. However, I now have a new topic I can dive deeply into and learn more about!

Of course there were many more lessons, but these should probably go into their own articles…